


Gin Matsuba

by CaptaInCynophobIa (ferryboats)



Category: Naruto
Genre: Dragon!Tobirama, Gen, M/M, Not to be reposted to other sites, discontinued, reposted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-29 11:07:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20434985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferryboats/pseuds/CaptaInCynophobIa
Summary: Tobirama was not born a Senju. He wasn't even born human. He was just a silver-coloured koi in the Senju Clan's ornamental fish pond. But a koi is just a fancy carp, and a carp that swims to the top of the waterfall becomes a dragon.Discontinued. Reposted after deletion.





	Gin Matsuba

# The Silver Koi

Senju Butsuma had three sons.

The eldest was Senju Hashirama, a bright and lively child full of wonder despite the ongoing war and episodic hard times that befell the Senju Clan. Senju Itama was quiet and gentle. Senju Kawarama was diligent, but very young.

And Senju Tobirama?

He certainly didn’t come into the world with that name.

He hatched in the koi pond out behind the Clan Head’s house, the offspring of two of Butsuma’s wife’s prized nishikigoi a year or so after the birth of Hashirama. Hashirama’s mother used to bring her bouncing toddler out to sit at the edge of the water to feed the koi most days. The small boy was enamoured with the equally small koi with the glittering silver scales and pale eyes.

Unlike their wild cousins, the carp, koi generally didn’t live particularly exciting lives. Often they were born, lived, and died in the very same pond as their ancestors and their offspring. Sometimes one might be sold or given away, taken to a new pond, but apart from unusual happenings that was the extent of the mischief they got up to. Had it not been for an encounter with an egret near the end of his first year of life, it would have been very likely that Tobirama’s life would have continued in such a mundane fashion as the lives of his parents, and his grandparents, and his great grandparents.

As it was, one warm afternoon a migrating great white egret spied the brilliantly glittering scales of Tobirama and his siblings the koi pond behind the Senju Clan Head’s house from on high, and saw there an opportunity to secure itself a snack before it continued the next leg of its journey.

The adult koi, all nearing two feet long or more, were in no danger from the egret, but the almost-yearlings were the right size to be snatched up and swallowed in a quick stab of that long and deadly beak, and the pond didn’t have enough shelter for the little tosai to escape.

It was just as the beak was descending to snap up the slip of sparkling silver koi that would later become Tobirama that Hashirama stumbled out of the house, tripped off the engawa, and sprinted across the garden, waving his little pudgy arms as he shouted at the egret to get away from his fish. Startled, with only a weak grip on Tobirama’s caudal fin, the egret took flight.

Koi could not very well breathe in the open air, and the fish immediately began to thrash as the bird swooped across the landscape. A moment later, his fin tore and he plummeted from the egret’s beak down, down, down, to hit the surface of the Nakano river with a splash so powerful it knocked the small koi quite senseless. By the time he came back to himself, he had drifted downstream.

Somehow, innately, he knew he was downstream from his home, his pond, so he did the logical thing and began to swim back up the Nakano.

He didn’t know what the river looked like near the Senju Clan Compound, though, and without knowing it swam right past the bank of the river where Senju shinobi sometimes fished. Days went by, and he was sure he should have found it by now, not knowing he’d swum past long ago, and he kept going, upstream, onwards and onwards.

Before too much longer he forgot why he was swimming upstream at all. Koi had tolerable memories, for fish, but they lived more in the here-and-now than in the past or the future, so all the little silver tosai knew was that he had to keep swimming up the river. Seasons went by. He became sluggish with cold, and then the warm came again and he kept swimming until the next cold came.

Season after season, until he was no longer a small yearling koi but fully grown and almost a yard long and six years old. By then, although he didn’t know it, he had long since left the Land of Fire behind, and was drawing near the origin of the Nakano, at a glacier deep within the mountains of the Land of Iron.

He had swum up waterfalls before, but the heavy torrent of frigid water that came rushing down off the ancient glacier was something else entirely. The silver koi that would become Tobirama knew deep within his bones, however, that this was the last waterfall he would ever face, and also that he would have to throw every part of himself into the battle to get to the top, for this would be the greatest ever feat a koi, or indeed any of his wild carp cousins, could face.

With a great arcing leap out of the water he began his difficult ascent. Several times he was almost washed away as the water surged. Others, it felt like his strength was abandoning him, but he forged onward anyway.

Up, through the freezing water that made him sleepy and weak.

And then he leapt up in one final great leap—

And splashed into a pool that had eaten into glacier, ringed on all sides by high walls of ice. The current was strong so close to the falls, so he moved quickly into the centre of the deep, blue-green pool, where it was still. He swam in lazy circles for a minute, dizzy and confused and more than a little exhausted. The silver koi was half asleep when the tingling in his spine began. It wasn’t enough to drag him out of his mindless swimming. Nor when the sensation crept down into his pectoral fins and pelvic fins.

He hardly noticed when he began to instinctively paddle his new paws to move himself forward, even as his neck and spine elongated, ribs springing out and tucking up, caudal fin and dorsal fins turning to long strands of fine silver hair. His blunt nose turned into an elegant muzzle, nostrils formed, rows of great sharp teeth erupted from his gums. His barbels stretched and become flowing whiskers as long as his body. A pair of small velvety antlers, with just a single tine each, sprouted above his brand-new ears, which were line with soft, downy fuzz.

It wasn’t until he blinked his new eyelids that he realized that he was changed, no longer a koi because he had never blinked in his life – koi did not possess eyelids.

He shook his head, twisting himself around in the water to look at the talon-like claws on his dexterous paws and his long, sinuous body, with scales on his belly and short white fur on his sides, and he knew, instinctively: dragon.

With that acknowledgement, within a fraction of a second, he knew _many_ things. He knew he could breathe above the water as well as below. He knew that the domains of the land and the sky and the water were all his to explore, now. He could run and swim and fly. He knew he was the first carp to reach a dragon gate in hundreds of years. He remembered he was born a long way from here, in a closed-in pond, in a land where it was warm and there were many trees, and the men had been at war for centuries.

He knew it had been six years since he was taken by the egret, that he himself was seven years old, and that his little human friend, the one who used to visit him every day with his mother would now be nine.

He also knew that it would be a simple matter to fly back – for all the journey to the waterfall had taken him six years, it wouldn’t take him a day to fly back.

Indeed, he had just climbed out of the pool and was scaling one of the ice walls when a head appeared on the glacier above him.

“Hello,” said the snow leopard. “We’ve been watching you.”

# The Snow Leopards’ Proposal

The dragon was not bothered by the cold wind or the ice beneath his paws. The blood that ran through his veins was no longer the cold blood of a fish that slowed and became sluggish like a river blocked by ice, but hot and fast and constant, like licking flames. How could a dragon soar in the skies, where the atmosphere was thin as frost built up in their fur and whiskers even on the warmest summer day, if they retained cold blood?

So the dragon sat comfortably on the creaking, shifting glacier across from a pair of large and fluffy snow leopards. One was curled around himself, holding his tail in his mouth, but the other was looking him up and down with interest.

“I’ve never heard of one of those fancy carp the humans keep going through a dragon gate,” the second leopard said, flicking her ear.

“Saa, it’s never happened before,” the dragon replied. “You may find that to be the reason you have never heard of it happening.”

She shifted her weight to a stance where she would be readier to pounce. The dragon narrowed his eyes, and she chuffed and relaxed again. “For all that you’re the first, it doesn’t seem to have made you dull,” she said. “I’m Kurumi. My brother is Mikan. We’ve been watching the dragon gate here for a long time, at haha-ue’s behest.”

Mikan gently put his tail down. “Gamamaru-sama, of the toads of Myoubokuzan, our allies, foresaw that a dragon would be born here,” he said. “But they do not like the cold very much. We, however, do not mind it.”

“We’re supposed to ask you to ally yourself with us,” Kurumi said. “Even a young dragon could easily go toe-to-toe with some of the strongest demons that roam the lands. And there are many, many demons here.”

The dragon knew, without having to think on it, that her statement was true. Dark things prowled in the shadows as often as in broad daylight. He was also a young dragon, as he’d been a young koi. Koi could live for fifty years, a hundred years, the oldest had been a little under three hundred when she died. He was seven. From nose to tail-tip he was maybe five feet long, and a dozen inches at the shoulder.

The oldest dragons could grow to hundreds of feet in length, stood as high as castles, and had racks of antlers like the branches of a great tree. Battling a bijuu would be nothing to them, for they came from nature chakra and were immensely powerful for it.

They were all dead, though.

The silver dragon knew they were dead, but he didn’t know _why_.

Well, he did know that climbing to one of the dragon gates was a feat few carp attempted, and only a fraction of those who tried survived. A carp might become a dragon every thousand years, but no more often than that, which explained why he was the first dragon to be born since the great old dragons all died.

But the gate had not imparted him the knowledge of what killed them.

For the first time in his life, the dragon frowned.

“I am not averse to the idea of allying myself to you,” the dragon said to the snow leopards. “But I can’t stay here. I left a friend behind, one who I just remembered, and I need to go and check on him. I do not think I would be a very good ally to the snow leopards, saying I would aid you against the demons, only to turn around and fly off straight away, so I don’t think I can help you.”

Mikan’s face fell, and he hunched his shoulders, his ears drooping.

“That’s alright!” Kurumi said, cheerfully. “If you sign our contract, we can summon each other! If we need help, we’ll summon you, and if you need help, you can summon us!”

The silver dragon considered. Yes, that might work… “But I don’t have a name,” he said, a little sheepishly.

“Do you want us to give you one?” Kurumi asked.

The dragon did not necessarily think he wanted to be named by a pair of snow leopards who were themselves called _walnut_ and _mandarin_. He had a feeling he might end up with a name that might not suit him, like _peach_ or _cherry flower_. “No, thank you,” he decided.

“Aw, we would have given you the best name! Not to worry, it should probably work if you just give your pawprint and your intention,” Kurumi said. A moment later she pressed her paw onto the ice. Lines of glowing kanji spread out across the surface of the glacier, and a moment later a third snow leopard appeared.

This one was larger, and somewhat stern-looking, with a torn left ear and a scar on her nose.

“Ume,” Kurumi chirped. “We need the scroll so the dragon can sign it! Gamamaru-sama was right! A carp did come up this dragon gate.”

Ume looked at them all with distaste. “Very well,” she said, and retched the scroll up.

Watching the snow leopards work to open the scroll, the dragon supposed that since they did not have opposable thumbs then carrying it around in the stomach of a chosen clan member made the most sense. Kurumi and Mikan had been roped into sitting on the corners as Ume unrolled it with her nose. It was a large scroll, but there were only a scant handful of names written on it, all written in blood, with bloody fingerprints beneath.

“Sign here,” Ume said, and her voice was big and deep and gruff. She indicated the correct spot with her paw. “With your dominant paw. Use your blood as ink.”

The dragon looked down at his paws and wondered which one his dominant paw was. He’d never had a dominant fin, back when he was a fish, because that would have made swimming very difficult. Though, when he was hunting larvae, he did prefer to attack to the right over his left. He bit his dew claw on his right forepaw and smeared blood liberally over his other toes, before pressing it against the heavy paper of the scroll.

“All done!” Kurumi crowed cheerfully. “Well, you’d better do and check on your friend, I suppose.”

“Yes. I think I would like to,” the dragon agreed. “I have not seen him in many years, and he lives in a war-torn land, so I worry.”

“Why haven’t you gone yet, then?” Mikan asked, even as Ume busied herself swallowing the scroll again before reverse summoning herself back to wherever it was that snow leopards came from.

“I understand how to fly in theory,” the dragon explained. “But I had a bad fall, once, and I’m feeling a bit nervous.”

Kurumi and Mikan looked at each other.

“How can a koi have a fall?” Mikan wondered aloud. “You lived in water your whole life up until now, didn’t you?”

Except for the half-minute of the egret incident, unfortunately.

# A Name

The silver dragon found the Senju Clan Compound in the middle of the night and without thinking went straight to the koi pond behind the Clan Head’s house, slipping into the balmy water with nary a splash. The koi shied away from him, which was wise, although it made a place just behind his sternum ache. His family feared him.

Feeling miserable, he took himself off to curl up under a lily pad and sulk. By the time the sun rose, the fish that had once been the dragon’s family had acclimatised to his presence, and the big glittery pale koi that he was decently certain was his mother had even come up to nibble curiously at the hairs of his tail.

“Good morning, pretty fish!” a young boy’s voice rang out, and the koi, who had been swimming about the pond lazily perked up to swim toward the small boy with the brown bowl-cut hair who had appeared with a bucket in his hand and a smile on his face. “I have food!”

Curious, and not just a little bit hungry, the dragon swam out, too.

The boy yelped in surprise when the dragon poked his head above the water, but recovered quickly. “You aren’t a fish! Get out of my pond!”

The dragon wondered where his mother, the woman with the flyaway white hair, was.

“Out, out,” the boy insisted, hefting his wooden bucket as if to throw it.

The dragon hopped out of the water onto the grass beside the pond, shaking the water from his tail with an idle flick. “Sorry,” the dragon said. “But I was born here, and I was visiting my parents.”

“You were born in my koi pond?” the boy asked, wonderingly, then wrinkled his nose, rocking back on his heels. “I don’t think so. I would’ve noticed if a dragon hatched in my pond!”

“I was so born here! Seven years ago. Except I was a koi, obviously, not a dragon. Then an egret picked me out of the pond and dropped me in the Nakano and I couldn’t find my way home, so I swam all the way upstream to the dragon gate where the river starts, and I turned into a dragon,” the dragon explained.

The boy blinked at him. “Oh,” he said. “I remember! I remember you, you were haha-ue’s favourite. She was so sad when that mean bird got you. Hello, I’m Hashirama. Do you want to be my friend?”

“Yes, but I don’t have a name,” the dragon replied. He considered the bucket. “You have food?”

Hashirama grinned at him. “Yes, but this is for the fish. It’s rude to offer fish food to a guest. I should give you tea and proper food. I’m a shinobi, so I don’t have to know that much about civilian courtesy, but even I know that. Come on.” He dumped the contents of the bucket – mostly food scraps – into the pond, then made a beckoning motion with his hand. “Come with me. I’ll give you something proper.”

Hashirama led the small dragon up onto the engawa and along to a doorway, before motioning for him to stay.

“I’ll come back with your tea and food. Is there anything you like to eat, or don’t?” Hashirama asked.

“I eat plants and fish,” the dragon replied.

Hashirama nodded. “Okay, stay here. I don’t want someone to see you and try to kill you. Shinobi are a bit like that.”

The dragon considered. “Would it be better if I was a human, like you?”

“Like a henge?”

“I don’t know what that is, but I can change shapes.” Apart from changing from a koi into a dragon, the little dragon had never changed its shape, but he knew, innately, that he possessed the ability, just as he knew he could fly and breathe underwater. With a distant tingle that started in his claws and tail and sped up as it rushed toward his chest and head, he turned himself into a human boy. He didn’t really know what he looked like, but he did know that he was a human now.

“You’re naked,” Hashirama said. “That’s not a very good henge.”

“I don’t know what a henge is,” the dragon-turned-boy repeated. “I was a dragon and now I’m a boy. I was not wearing clothes as a dragon, so I’m still not wearing clothes now.”

Hashirama took in a long, slow breath. “Okay, okay. Wait here. I’ll go find something for you to put on, because people don’t just walk around naked outside of home.” He kicked off his sandals, leaving them on the engawa – not that the dragon had any idea about etiquette – and bounded off inside.

“I don’t have a home,” the dragon-turned-boy mused to himself.

It was at this moment that Senju Butsuma stepped outside to see what had got his eldest son worked up so early in the morning. A shinobi he might technically be, but Hashirama could be as loud as a herd of stampeding elephants when he wasn’t being careful, especially as he made his way through an old wooden building.

From the way Butsuma stared down at the ghostly pale, red eyed, white haired, and completely naked boy sitting on his engawa, this was not what he expected to have diverted Hashirama on this particular morning. The dragon hadn’t expected Butsuma, either, and he gaped up at the huge human man in surprise. For all he’d flown over active battlefields where shinobi fought with blades and the elements themselves, and old battlefields where unburied skeletons and desiccated corpses lay beneath the sun, he hadn’t quite realised adult humans were as big as they were.

Seen through the distortion of the water, they had always seemed both closer and further away.

“If you don’t have a home, do you have a clan?” Senju Butsuma asked.

“Clan?” the dragon-turned-boy said, glancing at the koi pond. He didn’t think koi were organised enough to have clans. They were just fish, after all. “No. Not really.”

Butsuma regarded him warily for a long moment. “Are you a shinobi?”

The dragon-boy thought about that. “I don’t think I am. How do you know if you’re a shinobi, or a regular human?”

“Have you had any training?”

“Yes. I’m very good at swimming.”

Butsuma sighed. For some reason that hadn’t been the answer he was looking for. The dragon wondered what his answer was supposed to have been. “Might I see your hands?”

The dragon-boy showed him his little human hands, still plump with baby fat, and Butsuma observed them closely, turning over one and then the other. The dragon didn’t know it, but he was looking for the thin scars and callouses that came with bukijutsu, although all there was to find was soft, unblemished skin. Butsuma examined his feet, after, pausing at the very bad scar that bisected the dragon-boy’s left foot completely, the injury the egret’s beak had done to his caudal fin that had translated first to his back paw and now to the sole of his human foot.

“Where did you come from?” Butsuma asked, putting the dragon-boy’s foot down and meeting his eyes.

The dragon-boy pointed at the koi pond. “Just over there.”

Butsuma followed the direction of his finger, frowning deeply. “There’s nothing in that direction for a hundred miles,” he said to himself, ignoring the pond entirely. “Those clan markings aren’t familiar to me at all. You’re definitely not Nohara, or Akimichi. You aren’t Uchiha, or Hagoromo, not looking like that. A Hatake? You almost have the colouring, except for the eyes. What was it like before you came here?”

“Cold. There was snow and ice and a waterfall. I met some snow leopards,” the dragon-boy said. “I have clan markings?”

Butsuma nodded, and sketched three lines on his own face with his fingers. “Red stripes. Here, here, and here.” One beneath each eye, running off down his cheeks toward his jaw, and one on his chin. “You seem to be lost, child, and a very long way from home, wherever your home is. Tell me, how old are you?”

The dragon-boy answered truthfully. “I’m seven!”

“And what’s your name?”

“Oh, I don’t have one. One of the snow leopards I met offered to name me, but her name was walnut, so I said no. What’s your name? Maybe you could give me a name,” the dragon-boy asked hopefully.

“I’m Butsuma,” the man said.

“Altar room,” the dragon-boy mused. It seemed as odd as walnut, as far as names went, but perhaps all names were like that. The dragon didn’t really know. “You can name me, Butsuma!”

“Butsuma-sama,” Butsuma corrected him. “I’m the head of this clan, so you address me with respect.”

“Sorry, Butsuma-sama!” the boy said, immediately, all the while thinking that humans were complicated creatures.

Butsuma considered him for a while. “Tobirama,” he decided.

“The space between two doors,” the dragon echoed. Then he nodded, smiling a smile with just a few too many sharp teeth. “I like it! Thank you, Butsuma-sama.”

Hashirama reappeared, a bundle of clothing under his arm, and pulled up short. “Oh,” he said, shrinking in on himself. “Chichi-ue. Uh, this isn’t what it looks like!”

“It looks like you’re going to give Tobirama-kun here some clothes, and invite him inside to share breakfast with us,” Butsuma said, in a tone that brooked no argument.

Hashirama grinned broadly. “Yes, chichi-ue!” he said, immediately cheerful again, and he helped Tobirama get dressed.

# The Adoption Senju Tobirama

Butsuma initially intended to feed, clothe, and send the little white-haired child on his way. The Senju Clan was at war, as it had been for generations, and they didn’t need another dependent. There was, however, something extraordinarily odd about the little boy. It wasn’t just that he was as pale as a ghost, or that his eyes were as red as the Sharingan, or that he had clan markings that Butsuma didn’t recognise. Nor was it the fact that he was very, very lost, if he was telling the truth about where he had come from.

There were no snow leopards in the Land of Fire, after all.

Butsuma himself had only ever heard of them, and the closest ones he knew of were up in the mountains in Land of Lightning.

Nor was it the fact that the child had genuinely not been in possession of a name until Butsuma had given him one, although that was exceptionally odd in its own right. Butsuma had heard, of course, of some clans who did not freely offer even their given names out of superstition, and of others that did not name children until they reached their first year because it was bad luck to gift a babe with a name too soon.

But a seven-year-old with no name to speak of was unorthodox.

When questioned about it, the boy explained: “My parents didn’t have names either, not that I knew of. Or my siblings.”

So Butsuma asked him about his parents, and Tobirama’s answer was… disturbing. “My family was normal, I think, though I turned out quite different. They aren’t the sort to go on adventures. When I was much smaller they might have eaten me, if I got in the way, or we were short of food. Quite a few of my siblings went that way.”

Butsuma, of course, had no idea was speaking about the habit koi had of consuming their own eggs and fry, as well as everything else in their ponds that they might consider even remotely edible. He took this to mean instead that whatever unnamed clan Tobirama was from, they partook in the practice of regular cannibalism of their own offspring.

It was about at this point, about three days after he had met and named the child, that Butsuma started to seriously consider adopting Tobirama into the Senju. He was a shinobi, not a samurai, and as such honour did not mean much to him, but the idea of sending a child just a little older than Itama back to what was potentially a horrific death, if he even made the journey since he obviously wasn’t from any nearby clans, did not sit right with him.

On the fourth day, the Senju went to war with the Hagoromo, and Butsuma fought with Hashirama on the field. He did not think about Tobirama back at the compound, with his two youngest sons, except to hope that Tobirama was not some sort of assassin sent in to destroy the clan from the inside out while the warriors were out on the battlefield, decimating their morale and leaving them vulnerable to future attack.

He came home in the dark, apprehensive, to find them all three small boys curled before the fire like so many kittens, and decided to no longer worry about the pale-haired waif.

The next day, he beckoned for Tobirama to accompany him when he took Hashirama and Itama out to practice the shinobi arts.

At first, he was useless, immediately cutting his hand open from the tip of his thumb all the way to the base of his palm when Butsuma handed him a shuriken. It took the Senju Clan Head a moment to realise he had never held a weapon before in his life, nor had he watched his elders training with them. He had absolutely no idea how to handle a shuriken without hurting himself with it.

When shown how to do something correctly, however, Tobirama proved to be something of a prodigy. The physical aspects of shinobi life seemed to come to him as easily as breathing, for all that he had not started training at toddlerhood, like the other children, but instead at seven. He was fast and strong and perfectly willing to be vicious, and after having chakra theory explained to him in the simplest possible terms, he began to soak up ninjutsu like a sponge soaked up water. His chakra control was immaculate, and he was walking up walls and on the ceiling within days.

Within weeks, he was experimenting with his chakra and had begun to try to create new jutsu.

Butsuma might have been tempted to be proud of him, were it not for one thing.

Tobirama was worse than Hashirama when it came to understanding and accepting the rules that governed the lifestyle of the shinobi. Or, well, people in general. Butsuma supposed it was to be expected of the child, with his unorthodox background, coming from a clan many times wilder and more savage than the Uchiha could aspire to be.

“On the battlefield, a shinobi must put his emotions aside,” Butsuma explained to the four boys in front of him.

Hashirama and Itama had already heard this, but Hashirama was excitable and somewhat scatter-brained, and Itama, who was four, was young enough to need reminding of the rules ever now and again. Kawarama, almost three and speaking in full if simple sentences, was just beginning his lessons.

Tobirama frowned, his lower lip jutting out in that pout the way it did when he didn’t understand something, and Butsuma knew what he was about to say before he even said it. “Why?”

He always wanted to know _why_. Why, why, why. Why did they do this? Why did that work? Sometimes Butsuma knew the answer – sometimes the answer was obvious, or intuitive to anyone except Tobirama, who had grown up with monsters and hadn’t even know how to use chopsticks that first morning. Other times, Tobirama asked things with answers that no one could know.

This time, Butsuma knew the answer. “Emotions can be a distraction on the battlefield, and if you allow yourself to be distracted when you’re fighting an enemy, they will take advantage of your lapse, and kill you.”

“Ah,” Tobirama said, accepting the answer and filing it away to repeat it verbatim later on. “I see.”

Other questions had included: “Why do I have to wear shoes? I’m only going to take them off again.”

“Why cook that? Why not just eat it raw?”

“Why will it make me sick if it’s old? Eating old meat has never made me sick before, and I’ve done it lots. I used to eat whatever floated down the river, if it was small enough.”

“Why are you the leader of the clan and not someone else?”

“Why aren’t leaders chosen? Wouldn’t it make sense for the clan to choose the person they think is best fit to lead, rather than someone who inherited the position?”

“Why do you fight other humans?”

“Why are you at war?”

“Why do you keep fighting if you don’t even remember what you’re fighting about? That’s stupid.”

“Why don’t you just stop fighting?”

“Why do you call the Uchiha Clan demons? They’re just humans, too, aren’t they? Or are they actually demons? I’m supposed to fight real demons. Kurumi told me.”

“Why did all the old dragons die? Do you know? No one I’ve asked knows what happened to the dragons.”

Oddly, Tobirama could read perfectly. His ability to read kanji far outstripped Hashirama’s, and rivalled that of any adult in the clan, which was just peculiar, since his education was so utterly lacking in other areas. Sometimes, Butsuma wondered if he wasn’t some sort of strange spirit that had wandered into their compound by mistake. But that couldn’t be right, because then he would peer out the window and spot the boy trailing after another of the Senju adults, pestering them with his multitudinous questions about the world, tripping a little over his too-large sandals, and he didn’t look very spirit-like.

Butsuma had been surprised to discover that no one questioned Tobirama’s appearance in his household.

The Senju Clan Head thought a clan of shinobi would be more suspicious than that, but the rumour going around was that Tobirama had always been his son. He’d just been a sickly child, one who had to be kept inside so he didn’t die, and it was only recently that he’d become well enough to venture outdoors. Somehow, the way Tobirama seemed enraptured by the compound and the people seemed to reinforce this rumour, and the only people who could dispel it were Butsuma, Hashirama, or his late wife. Itama and Kawarama were too young, and Tobirama had already agreed that he belonged to Butsuma when asked by one of the elders.

Technically, the koi pond was Butsuma’s, and the fish in it were ultimately his even if Hashirama was the one who cared for them, although Butsuma had no way of knowing that this was why Tobirama agreed that he was Butsuma’s child.

One afternoon, after training, when Tobirama was showing Itama a new water jutsu he was working on down by the riverside, Butsuma called Hashirama aside.

“I want you to tell me where Tobirama really came from, son,” Butsuma said – because he was not blind to the way his oldest child regarded the white-haired boy with a certain degree of mystified wonder, like he couldn’t believe he existed at all. As if he knew something everyone else didn’t.

Hashirama’s eyes widened, and he glanced anxiously down towards the river.

“You’re not in trouble, and Tobirama won’t be either, but I need to know who his clan was. I need to know if they will come after him. Where did he come from? Where did you find him?”

Hashirama wrung his hands in his shirt and shifted from one foot to the other. “Please don’t hurt him.”

“You misunderstand me. I want to make sure we can protect him.”

Hashirama brightened immediately, his emotions swinging from one extreme to another, in that way Butsuma could not discourage him of. “Oh! That’s all right then. He came out of the koi pond!”

Butsuma wasn’t even sure what he was expecting.

With no real answer as to the child’s origins forthcoming, he made up his mind. “Tobirama, come here, please.”

Tobirama looked up, red eyes glinting oddly, like water reflecting the light. Butsuma blinked, and Tobirama was padding towards him on silent feet, having somehow lost his sandals again. “Yes, Butsuma-sama?” he said, coming to stand in front of him with an inquisitive expression on his face.

“I have decided you will be my son,” Butsuma said. “From now on, you will be Senju Tobirama. There is no need for a formal adoption – most of the clan already believes you are my child.”

Tobirama considered him, or perhaps this command, for a moment, before inclining his head politely. “Very well. Thank you, Butsuma-sama.”

“You may call me chichi-ue from now on, if you so wish.”

“Thank you, Butsuma-sama,” Tobirama repeated. “Was that all?”

“Yes.”

And Tobirama trotted back off to join Itama again.

Hashirama sniffed, grinning wide. “Thank you, chichi-ue!” he cried.

# The Riverbank

Hashirama had taken to disappearing for hours at a time. Tobirama didn’t blame him. It was getting harder to stay in Butsuma’s household. As the war dragged and they suffered losses closer and closer to home, Butsuma’s temper with his children had begun to fray, and he snapped and snarled at his children like an injured animal most days.

Sometimes, Tobirama wanted to fly away and leave them all behind, but then he thought about how distraught Hashirama would be if he went missing, how there would be no one sensible to look after Kawarama or Itama, who could no longer fight and who Butsuma seemed to despise because of it.

Tobirama might have saved their lives, but he hadn’t been fast enough to protect them from the horrors that the adult humans from other clans would inflict upon them, either.

The dragon-turned-boy didn’t understand why killing had to be so brutal. Why would the Hagoromo go to the effort of attempting to tear someone apart if they weren’t even intending to eat them? It was not a kind death, or a kind life afterwards, when Kawarama survived but missing his right arm at the elbow and walked with a limp always, after the bones in his right leg had been shattered so badly they would never properly heal.

Itama did not speak of the horrors he had beheld as the victim of a Sharingan-induced genjutsu, but after kunai clattered uselessly from his trembling hands, and when he tried to mould his chakra it flared with his terror, and no jutsu succeeded.

Tobirama had saved his little brothers, but he also been too late.

So, like Hashirama, when the day was quiet and neither Kawarama nor Itama needed his help, he would take to the skies, or follow Hashirama down to the river to slip into the water.

Tobirama had no opinion one way or the other of the friend Hashirama sometimes met there, Madara, except, perhaps, that he was loud. He was an Uchiha, but he was Hashirama’s age, and he indulged Hashirama in whatever light-hearted fun he could think up that day. It made the dragon happy, to see at least one of his adopted siblings also happy. And since neither Madara nor Hashirama had offered each other their surnames, then they could continue to see each other as friends with plausible deniability on their side.

Of course it was entirely possible that neither of those two idiots had realised who the other was, Tobirama mused as he sat in the current of the Nakano, keeping himself in place with gentle sweeps of his long and powerful tail. He was pretending to be a fish, or perhaps a large specimen of eel, though if anyone had stepped onto the surface of the water and wandered over to look at him more closely they would realise that he was, in fact, quite draconic.

The idiots were having a cliff-climbing race today. They didn’t need his supervision. Tobirama came to the river with Hashirama because he liked the river itself, and not because he thought his elder brother needed to be babysat. The dragon was busy thinking, anyway. He needed some way to get from one location to another fast. Certainly, he was very good now at shifting between dragon and boy, and as a dragon he was faster than even the fastest shinobi, but people were confused about how he could disappear from once place and appear in another to defend a clanmate – completely naked.

His clothes just didn’t fit him when he was a dragon. He was too long as slender, and they slipped right off his body. And while facing down enemies of the Senju without a stitch of clothing on him did tend to throw them off for some reason, even he had to admit it wasn’t an ideal situation. As a human he was all soft and squishy, and although he healed fast he had lots of vulnerable places where he very much would not like to take a kunai, or even a little senbon.

Tobirama liked the scales that protected his belly. They were like little shifting disks of steel. He was never afraid of getting the tip of a sword or a kunai or a senbon stuck in his intestines when he was in the shape of as dragon.

Perhaps a jutsu, to take him from one place to another while he was wearing the overlapping plate armour of a Senju shinobi?

That might work.

Oh, the sun was starting to go down, and Hashirama was waving goodbye to Madara, who stood on the opposite side of the riverbank.

Hashirama waited a few moments after Madara turned and leapt away, as Tobirama cut lazily across the current and slipped out of the water, shaking it from his mane and flicking out his tail, before turning back into a boy. He retrieved the clothes he had left tucked beneath a sun-warmed stone further up the riverbank and pulled them on, padding after Hashirama barefoot as they headed back to the compound. As they went, Hashirama told him about the wild dream he and Madara had thought up, the one where they would each get powerful and become the leaders of their clan, and then they would sue for peace, and build a village together.

There would be a school where children could learn to be shinobi properly, and not have to go and face the battlefield when they were still just children. Missions would be given to shinobi of appropriate calibre. No longer would a mission that was too dangerous be given to someone who didn’t have enough experience to survive it. With a stable village there would be a stable economy, and they wouldn’t have to go months with scarcely anything to eat anymore.

It sounded wonderful.

Tobirama hoped they achieved it.

And then, one evening not long after, Butsuma asked him to tail Hashirama to the river and report back on who he was meeting.

This conflicted Tobirama greatly. He didn’t want Hashirama to get in trouble for meeting Uchiha Madara, especially if Hashirama didn’t know Madara was Uchiha. And it wasn’t like they were sharing clan secrets or anything. They were talking about dreams and worlds that might be and nice things.

He also didn’t want to disobey his Clan Head.

So he began to tell half-truths when Butsuma pulled him aside quietly whenever he had, ostensibly, tailed Hashirama to the riverbank to spy on him, though in reality Hashirama knew he was there the entire time.

“Anija skipped stones today,” he told Butsuma one time.

“He practiced his water-walking,” he said another.

“He sat and watched the water go by,” he said, after Itama had had a difficult night, and Hashirama had gone to the riverbank in a morose mood that not even Madara could pull him out of. In the end, the two of them had sat there, watching the clouds reflected in the rushing water, and spoken quietly of the grief of loss. Tobirama hadn’t know Madara had been one of five, originally, though it was now just himself and his little brother, Izuna. That made his heart ache with sympathy. Hashirama still had both his real siblings, even if his mother was gone.

And he had an adopted brother that was really a dragon who was born as a koi in his koi pond.

It was a little difficult to truly pin down the relationship Tobirama had with Hashirama, though Tobirama liked to think he really was Hashirama’s brother, sometimes, and not a strange interloper in the household.

And then the day came that Tobirama knew he couldn’t keep Hashirama’s secret anymore. Because someone from the Uchiha Clan must have had the same idea as Senju Butsuma had, and had sent a little spy down to the riverside. Tobirama was getting very, very good at sensing chakra, and even divining people’s moods from the way their chakra felt. This helped a lot when he tried to aid Itama, who never spoke anymore and always had the same blank look on his face, right up until his expression screwed up in terror and he began to shake.

It also meant that Tobirama, who had been swimming in contented circles beneath the water, enjoying the way the sun hit his scales and reflected the light onto the river stones below him in interesting patterns, sensed the little hot smoulder of angry fire chakra hidden in the bushes on the other side of the river.

An Uchiha child, younger than Madara, unnoticed by both Madara and Hashirama, who were happily skipping stones a little way upriver.

There was little doubt in Tobirama’s mind that that child would take the information of Madara’s meetings back to the Uchiha Clan Head, and that the next time Hashirama came here, he would be in danger.

It broke his heart that he would have to tell Butsuma on his brother, and betray Hashirama’s trust.

But for his own safety, he had to.

Slipping silently from the water on silent paws, he slithered across the riverbank, fetched his clothes in his mouth, and skittered into the undergrowth to change. Then he headed back to the Senju Clan Compound to inform Butsuma.

It hurt, watching Butsuma reprimand Hashirama – threaten him with the label of traitor.

It hurt more when Hashirama turned his utterly betrayed expression on Tobirama.

_I’m sorry_, the dragon thought. _I had to_.

“Why did you do that?” Hashirama whispered harshly to Tobirama, in the dark of the room they shared with Kawarama and Itama, later that night. “Why’d you tell chichi-ue? I thought you liked Madara!”

“I do,” Tobirama agreed, quiet and mild, refusing to meet Hashirama’s anger with his own hurt. “Someone from the Uchiha Clan was spying on Madara, though, and it is no longer safe for you to meet him. Telling Butsuma-sama was the lesser of two evils, compared to losing you.”

“I hate you,” Hashirama hissed, rolling over to face the wall, but Tobirama knew he didn’t mean it. He was just upset and didn’t know how to express his sadness properly.

“Give me your stone for a minute,” Tobirama said. “You aren’t going to let Madara walk into a trap. My claws are sharp, I can scratch a message onto it.”

He thought Hashirama might not agree for a moment, or might decide to try and scrape out a warning with his kunai by himself, but in the end he reached under his pillow and handed Tobirama the flat river stone that Madara had skipped across the water to him that afternoon.

Kawarama and Itama were still awake, but they both knew Tobirama wasn’t really a proper human by now, and had know for a long time. Kawarama would never tell anyone, for he still remembered the day a small, fierce white dragon had appeared in front of him to defend him from the Hagoromo who would have killed him, rending their flesh with tooth and claw and antler, before turning to him and shifting back into the shape of his beloved elder brother who hugged him close and carried him all the way through a battlefield without a scrap of clothing on his body, back home to receive medical attention.

And Itama never spoke anymore, but he didn’t seem to mind whether Tobirama was in the shape of a human or a dragon – there were no fluctuations in his chakra to indicate fear or preference one way or another.

Neither of them reacted when Tobirama shifted from the shape of a twelve-year-old boy into a long and slender dragon that slithered into the patch of moonlight cast upon their bedroom floor through their window and curled up to delicately scratch the kanji for _trap, flee_, onto it with his claw.

He picked the stone up between his teeth and trotted back to Hashirama to lay it gently in his palm.

“I’ll go with Butsuma-sama when he follows you to the river,” he announced as he turned himself back into a boy and pulled his loose sleep yukata back on. “I can probably delay him, if I have to, to give Madara time to get away.”

Hashirama gave him a watery smile. “I’m sorry I said I hated you,” he told Tobirama. “You’re a good brother, really.”

“Yes, well. I like the idea you and Madara have for peace.”

But in the end it didn’t matter, because after they met at the riverbank next, Madara declared himself Hashirama’s enemy from that day forward.

Hashirama mourned.

Tobirama wondered what he should have done differently.

# The Uchiha Clan’s Tengu

The Senju Clan Compound had several kodama that Tobirama knew by sight, and had given names. He was friendly with them, but they didn’t speak to him except to echo his own words back at him. Mostly, they liked to linger around the trees Hashirama had grown while he was learning to use his Mokuton, imitating birdsong.

The Uchiha came to war with tengu at their backs, sometimes overlaying them. Madara had a particularly dedicated and vicious one, while the tengu that sometimes followed Izuna around always regarded Tobirama with an expression of bemusement.

Years had passed since the day Madara swore he and Hashirama were now enemies, and Senju Butsuma had been cut down in battle, leaving Hashirama the Clan Head. Not long after, Uchiha Tajima disappeared under mysterious circumstances, but when the Uchiha and the Senju next clashed both Madara and Izuna now possessed the Mangekyou Sharingan.

Tobirama could guess what had happened.

One summer afternoon, after he’d been up to spit on the clouds to encourage rain because the ongoing drought was beginning to look like the threat of famine later in the year, Tobirama was outside bothering the kodama when he had an idea.

Now, Tobirama was not necessarily know for his excellent ideas.

He certainly had a lot of ideas, and many of them were brilliant from a technical standpoint, but his moral compass was very much not human, and as such things he thought were perfectly acceptable the rest of the Senju had a tendency to think were utterly terrifying. This made many of his ideas bad ideas, though he still didn’t understand what was inherently wrong with summoning back the soul of someone dead if he wanted to ask them questions.

Anyway, he had an idea.

The kodama were contrary little things, which was just Tobirama’s luck because apart from the one dragon, himself, they were the only spirits that really hung around the Senju Clan Compound. Asking them what had happened to the old dragons was pointless, because whenever he did they just repeated the word dragon at him, then tweeted and whistled and clattered until he got fed up and went away to do something else.

But the Uchiha had tengu.

And maybe the tengu would be more willing to impart knowledge of the deaths old dragons, if they possessed it.

Maybe they knew nothing, but Tobirama considered it worth asking all the same.

Of course, the tengu were all absurdly protective of their chosen clan, so Tobirama was obviously going to have to ask Madara to speak to them first. Madara was loud and flailed a lot but he’d always seemed reasonable six years ago, back when Hashirama used to meet him at the riverside, so Tobirama didn’t think asking could hurt.

Still, he had a funny feeling that Hashirama might disagree with his idea. He wasn’t sure why, but he just knew Hashirama would object. So even though he felt excited at the prospect of maybe finally getting his answer, he resolved to set out after Hashirama had gone to sleep and fly to the Uchiha Clan Compound, so there would be no one who could stop him.

That night, as it was raining steadily because spitting on the clouds had worked wonders for getting them to give up their water, Tobirama slipped through the window and took flight.

It didn’t take him long to get to the Uchiha Clan Compound, and it wasn’t difficult to find Madara’s chakra amongst all the other chakra signatures. None of the Uchiha standing guard, miserable and damp in the humid rain, bothered to look up, so none of them saw the dragon spiral down to land in the garden just outside Madara’s window and slither inside on silent paws.

Tobirama considered waking Madara up, and decided he was too scary as a dragon, so he should confront the Uchiha Clan Head as a human, so he changed back before he called out: “Hey! Madara!” from a reasonably safe distance at the other end of the room.

Which was a good idea, because Madara woke with a start with a kunai in his hand, his eyes flaring into the glowing red of the Sharingan.

He paused when he spotted Tobirama standing sopping wet and naked in his bedroom, completely unarmed, in the middle of the night.

“You,” he snarled, and threw the kunai.

Tobirama ducked. “No need for dramatics, Madara. I just came to ask your permission for something.”

“Why do you think I would possibly grant you permission to do anything?” Madara spat. “Senju _dog_.”

“Look, it’s not that big a deal! I didn’t have to ask you anyway, I could’ve just gone ahead and done it. I just thought it would be more polite this way.”

“What are you talking about?” Madara snarled as he stood, reaching for the gunbai propped against the wall beside his futon.

“I wish to speak to your clan’s tengu, and I thought I might get a warmer welcome if I asked you about it first, since you’re the Clan Head,” Tobirama explained.

Madara paused, his hand on the shaft of his giant war fan. “What.”

“Your tengu,” Tobirama repeated. “I want to ask them if they know why the old dragons died.”

Madara blinked, muttered: “Kai,” to himself, then frowned. “I don’t have a tengu,” he said.

“Yes, you do,” Tobirama said. “It’s big, and blue, and a bit mean looking, if I’m being honest.”

Madara looked at him closely, and suddenly seemed to realise something. “Why are you naked?” He frowned, deeply.

“I flew here,” Tobirama explained. “And I can’t fly with clothes on. They just fall off whenever I try, and believe me I have tried. It just doesn’t work.”

“Right,” Madara said, as if he were seriously doubting Tobirama’s sanity in that moment. “Even supposing the Uchiha Clan did have tengu, and I think I would know if we did, what makes you think I would let a Senju dog like you speak with them? I should kill you here and now. I bet this is another one of Hashirama’s moronic ploys to get me to agree to peace. Maybe if I send your head back to him, he’ll finally get the message that the Senju and the Uchiha will _never_ be allies.”

Tobirama rocked back on his heels, ready to move at a moment’s notice, and keeping an eye on Madara to look for the tell-tale shift of weight and muscle that would indicate an incoming attack.

“Or maybe,” Madara said, his eyes narrowing. “You’ve come to assassinate me?”

Tobirama snorted. “I wouldn’t have bothered to wake you up. You’d be a lot easier to kill if you were still sleeping.”

“It could just be you have the same ridiculous sense of honour as your brother,” Madara suggested.

Tobirama regarded him dubiously. “I don’t think so. Hashirama finds most of the things I do quite upsetting, if I’m honest. And anyway, I’m only nominally a Senju, and that’s because I was born in Butsuma-sama’s koi pond. If I was born in your koi pond – which is quite lovely by the way, I’d like to come back and say hello to your fish – then I would just as likely be an Uchiha right now.”

“What,” Madara said.

“I know Hashirama told you I was adopted and that he found me in the pond when he was nine. I was there when you had that discussion,” Tobirama said, patiently.

“I thought he was pulling my leg!” Madara shouted.

Someone knocked on Madara’s door. “Madara-sama,” they called through the wood. “Are you alright?”

A brief panicked look entered Madara’s eye as he looked Tobirama up and down in all his nude glory – and Tobirama rather thought he’d grown up to be quite good looking for a young human man. He was lean and muscular and had a good height and a sharp face, even if he was pale as a ghost and his eyes were red as fresh blood. “Everything’s fine!” Madara called back. “Don’t come in!”

“Who are you shouting at?”

“Bad dream, don’t worry about it, Hikaku-san.”

The sound of soft footfalls heading down the hallway outside.

Madara put his gunbai down to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Why are you always naked?” he asked no one in particular. “Every time we skirmish with the Senju, you end up where you shouldn’t be with no clothes on. What sort of bizarre jutsu… It’s very distracting. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” Tobirama said, beginning to tire of this conversation. He just wanted to speak to the tengu. Madara was being unreasonably difficult. It wasn’t like it was an impossible request or something. “Look, can I talk to your tengu or not? I just want to ask them about the dragons.”

“This is a very strange dream,” Madara said to himself. “Fine, have fun talking to your imaginary spirits. Don’t let anyone see you, be gone by dawn, and don’t wake me up when you leave. Now leave me alone.”

Obligingly, Tobirama turned back into a dragon right in front of Madara and hopped back out the window into the night, calling out: “Thank you, Madara!” behind him.

“I need to stop eating so close to going to sleep,” Madara muttered.

# The Life And Death Of Uchiha Izuna

“Senju Tobirama never smiles,” Madara told Izuna, once. “If his lips go taut,” here he demonstrated a closed mouth smile. “It means he’s stressed. And if he shows his teeth, it’s a threat display.”

Izuna didn’t want to know how Madara knew that, but he suspected Hashirama was the source of his information.

Izuna despised Senju Tobirama with every single fibre of his being. If Hashirama was a blithering fool leading a pack of rabid dogs, then Tobirama was the wolf that stalked their flanks and picked them off with terrifying precision. He was the ultimate shinobi, his eyes never displaying any sort of emotion on the battlefield, always as hard and cold as ice, even while he grinned like an absolute maniac. Every jutsu was executed perfectly, without thought or obvious effort, as if they were second nature.

Tobirama was, frankly, the most frighteningly competent person Izuna had ever seen step foot on the battlefield. His own brother included. Madara got too angry when he was fighting Hashirama. It was a serious fault.

Crossing blades with the white demon felt a bit like being the mouse that decided he would attack the cat, and the cat was humouring him – playing with him.

It wasn’t comfortable.

And for some reason Tobirama targeted him unerringly whenever the Senju and Uchiha war parties met.

On the other hand, if Tobirama was busy batting Izuna around the battlefield then he wasn’t killing members of Izuna’s clan who wouldn’t stand a chance against him.

Izuna met Tobirama’s eyes, casting a genjutsu that Tobirama shook off with a mere blink, before kicking him back as hard as he could. Now with a moment to breathe, he flicked through the hand seals for his family’s signature katon jutsu to try and put some space between himself and Tobirama.

And somehow, trying his best to keep the demon at bay, he didn’t find the idea that he was sparing his clanmates a quick and brutal death very much comfort – although the very same tactics prevented Hashirama from utterly decimating their clan when he chose to focus solely on Madara.

Izuna’s fireball was met with a water dragon pulled from the moisture in the very air, and hot steam obscured the battlefield.

At least, the Uchiha heir thought, Tobirama hadn’t used that one unnamed and truly horrifying jutsu yet this battle.

Izuna had never quite recovered from the embarrassment of locking swords with Tobirama on the river ten years ago, only for Tobirama to suddenly disappear from his clothing and reappear on the riverbank two dozen feet away while his armour and abandoned sword were still falling into the water. Izuna had stumbled forward, and almost been hit by the kunai his own father had flung with the intention of killing Butsuma’s son. He’d had only been saved by the stone _Hashirama_ threw to try and save Tobirama from Tajima’s kunai, though Tobirama obviously didn’t need saving, not when he could move faster than a shunshin without even needing hand seals.

The part where Senju Tobirama mysteriously lost all his clothes when he did the thing where he moved faster than Izuna’s Sharingan could track him never ceased to be bizarre – and Izuna found the fact that he was often hard-pressed to keep up with him even after he’d abandoned weapons, armour, and even sandals a subject that was difficult to live down amongst his Uchiha agemates.

Madara understood him. He never laughed when Izuna came to gripe about being tossing around the field of battle like a ball of yarn by a cat. He took Izuna’s words very seriously.

Madara was a good brother.

Izuna suspected the pressure of being Clan Head was beginning to wear down on his sanity a little, since Madara thought that Tobirama was a spirit that had walked out of the Senju’s pond one day and the Senju had just shrugged their collective shoulders and adopted him. Somewhat inexplicably, Madara also thought that Tobirama could fly, control the weather and by extension drought and flood and famine, resurrect the dead, and control other spirits – including, for some reason, Izuna’s Susanoo, which he had expressly forbidden Izuna from using in battle against the Senju.

“I don’t want him to use your tengu against you,” Madara had explained, when pressed. “And he _likes_ your tengu.” He said this with a sort of quiet, pale horror that was quite unlike his usual self.

A couple of years ago, Madara had had the revelation that the Susanoo called forth by someone with the Mangekyou Sharingan was actually their clan’s tengu being summoned to aid them in battle. No one could refute this, it made sense in an odd sort of way, but most of the clan found Madara’s sudden superstition and interest in the spirits a bit disturbing.

When Izuna asked why Madara didn’t fight Tobirama, then, Madara had gone all sweaty and weird, and said: “You would die if you tried to fight Hashirama.”

While Izuna acknowledged that that was true, he had a sneaking suspicion that Madara was afraid of Senju Tobirama – which was ridiculous. Madara wasn’t afraid of anyone. He feared leading the clan to ruin and losing Izuna, to the point where he was often overbearing, but he didn’t fear people.

Izuna dodged a flurry of kunai thrown in his direction, then lunged forward to take advantage of the opening in his opponent’s defense while it was there.

He had to kill Senju Tobirama.

It might seem like an impossible feat, but it was the only way.

Tobirama vanished into thin air.

_Again_.

But this time, he didn’t leave his armour or weapons behind.

_Ah_, Izuna thought, a fraction of a second before he felt the pain of the gash on his side. _This is how I die_.

His next breath was agony, and rattled with the blood filling his right lung. He began to collapse, sword clattering to the stony earth below him as it slipped from his limp fingers. A moment later, Madara was there, catching Izuna before he could fall, snarling wordlessly at the Senju demon, who snarled back but held his ground.

“I thought you would be faster,” Tobirama told Izuna, dispassionately, ignoring Madara.

Izuna coughed, choking on the blood filling his lung.

“Saa, you’re not allowed to die,” Tobirama said. “If you die, I’ll call your soul back. You won’t like it. None of them like coming back from the Pure Lands. So, don’t die.”

Terror unlike anything he had felt before struck Izuna like a blow from a war hammer, and for a few moments he couldn’t take his next breath. It caught in his chest, gurgling, until he coughed again.

“Get away, Tobirama,” Hashirama snapped, and at last Tobirama went.

Izuna might have drifted for a while, but he came back to himself in time to hear that blithering fool, Hashirama, entreating Madara to make peace. “No, nii-san,” Izuna managed to choke out, around the blood in his throat. “Do not be fooled by them. Have you forgotten… those bastards killed everyone… killed the Uchiha?”

The white demon was no longer in Izuna’s line of sight, but he heard him scoff derisively, but Madara listened to Izuna, and they left the field.

Izuna woke in bed, chest spasming, breathless, to roll over and cough blood onto the floor beside the futon he was laying on. Madara hovered over him, pale and tired-looking, while moths flew against the lamp with a soft plinking sound. It was the middle of the night.

The next time he woke it was late afternoon, and he couldn’t cough. All he could do was lay and gasp shallowly.

Then the room was shrouded in the dim blue light of the hour just before dawn, and Izuna was too hot and too cold and he wasn’t sure where he was, or why he was there, and everything hurt.

The last time he woke with clarity, he reached out with trembling hands for Madara.

“I know—” he paused, breath rattling. “I know you’re going blind, nii-san. I know… what the Mangekyou is doing to you. I want – I want you to take my eyes—”

Madara protested, but Izuna was firm.

After, there was the pain in his chest, and agony in his eyes, but he didn’t have very many more moments of consciousness.

And then…

Izuna came awake slowly. His room was warm and just a little stuffy with the heat of a summer afternoon, in spite of the refreshing breeze that brushed across his cheeks and ruffled his hair. Outside, the cicadas were chirruping, and farther off he could hear children playing, the high shrieks of laughter and squeals of joy. The shoji door onto the engawa must be open…

There was a faint twinge when he inhaled deeply, but the rest of his pain was gone. He felt – okay. Good, even. A little tired, and thirsty, and hungry but otherwise good.

Without thinking, he opened his eyes.

And found himself looking straight into the most hated and despised face of Senju Tobirama, who was leaning over him wearing an expression of curiosity.

“Oh, good,” Tobirama said, sitting back on his heels. “I thought you were waking up.”

“If you’ve resurrected me, I want to go back.”

Tobirama sniffed. “Don’t be stupid. Hashirama doesn’t like it when I do that, and he won’t shout at me, but Touka will.”

Izuna blinked, then blinked again because he was surprised he _could_ blink, let alone see. There was something odd about Tobirama, something strange about the way he looked, and Izuna was going to work out what it was in just a moment, and—

“Hey! That’s my yukata!” Izuna objected, struggling to untangle himself from his blankets so he could sit up and level an appropriately lethal glare in Tobirama’s direction.

“It is,” Tobirama agreed, mildly.

Izuna thought he looked stupid. Tobirama was taller than he was, but a little narrower across the shoulders, so the sleeves sat lopsided and rode up his wrists. And that ink stain on the right sleeve meant there was no doubt that was Izuna’s yukata, he’d dragged his arm across his ink stone just a week before the last battle with the Senju and hadn’t been able to get it out.

“Why?” Izuna demanded.

“Madara always gives me your clothes when I come to visit,” Tobirama replied. “He doesn’t like it when I show up naked.”

“I wanted to know why my mortal enemy here, in my room, while I’m on my deathbed—” Izuna paused as the last cobwebs leftover from a long and fevered sleep suddenly cleared from his mind. Why was Senju Tobirama, the most lethal predator belonging to the Senju Clan, in the heart of the Uchiha Compound, unsupervised, free to kill Madara and the children and everyone he ever loved.

“Don’t,” Tobirama said.

But Izuna had already drawn in a deep breath and yelled, at the top of his croaked and disused voice: “Help! Intruder! Help!”

There was a flurry of movement faster than the eye could follow, and Izuna knew that this was his death for certain. He closed his eyes, not wanted to witness his impending doom when he was too weak to even get out of bed to defend himself. There was the sound of feet on the engawa outside, panting breaths, and then:

“Kanshougyo-sama, what’s going on? Is Izuna-sama alright? What’s wrong?” Hikaku asked.

_Fish_? Why was Hikaku calling Tobirama _fish_?

“Ah, false alarm, Hikaku-san,” Tobirama said. “I suspect Izuna-san was not expecting me to be present when he awoke. Now that you’re here, though, would you mind fetching Madara-san for me? I think he would be pleased to know that the healing was successful and his brother is awake and alert.”

“Yes, Kanshougyo-sama,” Hikaku said, and then there came the sound of his feet padding away quietly. He was a capable shinobi, and could move as silently as a whisper of wind, but it was generally polite to make some sound when moving about one’s own home. Or compound.

Izuna opened his eyes to look at Tobirama, wondering what sort of henge he was using that could fool even the Uchiha, and froze because _that was not a henge_.

Coiled on the floor next around his futon was not Senju Tobirama, but a tremendous white dragon. It had a set of antlers to rival that of any mature stag, a dozen lethally sharp tines on each. Its head was as large as that of a decently sized pony, and although it probably only stood two feet off the ground at its shoulder it was long enough from snout to tail tip to encircle Izuna’s futon completely, then drape its own tail across its shoulders.

Izuna activated his Sharingan – but it was not a henge, proven by the dragon’s fully developed and anatomically correct chakra coils. And shinobi couldn’t just turn into animals. That didn’t happen.

That was _not_ Senju Tobirama. It had never been Tobirama in the room with him, but this creature the entire time, wearing the face of his most hated enemy.

His yukata was folded neatly and sitting at the foot of his futon, as if it had never been worn.

“Kanshougyo-sama,” Izuna squeaked.

“Saa, you don’t have to call me that,” the dragon said, shifting its huge head to peer at him through one of its great pale red eyes. Its eye had a strange horizontally slit pupil that was a deeper red, except for when the light in the room seemed to hit it just right and for a moment it flashed white-orange, like the eye of a cat in the night. “Normally I would’ve taken my other form, but you were very intent on dying when I expressly told you not to, which meant that healing you took longer than it should have. Now your stupid clanmates think I’m a celestial being who flew down from the heavens for the express purpose of saving your life for some higher reason.”

Izuna gaped at the dragon. “You didn’t?”

Kanshougyo snorted, blowing warm air that tasted of lightning and rain across Izuna’s face. “Not really. Hashirama wants peace, and he was never going to get it if Madara is anything like me, because if anyone hurt that stupid tree stump, or Itama, or Kawarama, then I won’t stop until I’ve torn them to pieces. Since Madara is incapable of tearing me to pieces, no human has that power, then the Senju-Uchiha war would drag on for _another_ generation.”

Why would a heavenly dragon care about Hashirama, or a clan war? “Who are you, then?”

“Kami, you’re slow. I was wearing my other face when you woke up. Please tell me you remember. I don’t want to be the one to tell your brother you’re suffering oxygen deprivation induced brain damage.”

Madara stormed into the room at that precise moment, yelling: “Izuna’s _what_?”

“My head is fine!” Izuna yelled right back. “But this dragon is trying to convince me it’s _Senju Tobirama_.”

Madara abruptly stopped bristling, to Izuna’s immense confusion. “Oh, is that all.”

“Healing you might have been a little bit treasonous,” the dragon said, getting to its feet and stretching, lithe and catlike and _huge_. “It wouldn’t do for word to get back to the elders that Senju Tobirama was here, so don’t mention it, if you don’t mind. Telling them about Kanshougyo is fine. Only my brothers are aware of what I really am. Madara, now _your_ stupid brother’s awake, I suppose I’d better go back. _My_ stupid brother’s used to me going off for a week or two at a time, but he worries sometimes.” The dragon stepped over Izuna’s legs and planted its forepaws on the engawa, even while its rear end was still all the way back by the futon and its tail was brushing the far wall. It paused there to twist its head around to fix them with a stern glare. “Think about anija’s peace offering. This war is idiotic. No one remembers why you’re fighting in the first place and the only reason you’re still going is because you’ve forgotten how to not be at war.”

And with that, the dragon bunched its hindquarters beneath itself and launched itself into the air. A moment later it was a speck in the distance, and then it was gone.

Izuna was so surprised that he forgot to ask Madara whose eyes he now possessed for three entire days.

# Spitting Cat

Madara threw his hands up in the air, frustrated beyond words, snarled at the Hokage and his brother, and turned to storm out of the Hokage’s office, slamming the door open so hard it hit the wall, rebounded, and almost smacked him in the nose. Then he stomped off down the hall, a ball of roiling, furious chakra that had people yelping as they scrambled to get out of his way in a hurry.

Hashirama sighed heavily, and turned to Tobirama, who was feeling inordinately pleased with himself, and was basking in the chaos he had wrought. “Why do you do that, otouto?” Hashirama asked, despair lacing his voice and dragging his shoulders down. “I know you and Madara don’t like each other, but could you at least try to get along, for my sake? It’s very hard to work when you’re shouting at each other like that, and his proposal was a good one, so I don’t know why you had to shoot it down like that.”

“Oh, yes, it was very good,” Tobirama agreed, placid with happy feelings. “Excellent, in fact. I suggest you implement his suggestions immediately. They will vastly increase the speed with which we are able to despatch shinobi for time critical missions.”

Hashirama gaped at him, closed his mouth, opened it again to say something then thought better of it, and closed it with a click of his teeth. He took a deep breath, and let it back out again slowly. Tobirama thought he looked a bit like a fish, which was funny considering which one of them had been born a fish and which hadn’t. “Then why did you do that to poor Madara? Why do you hate him so much?”

“I don’t hate Madara,” Tobirama replied. “I just like it when he gets all red and puffed up like that. He reminds me of a defensive cat.”

The Hokage groaned and slumped in his chair until he had almost slithered off it entirely onto the floor under his desk.

“What’s wrong with you?” Tobirama asked him, not really concerned because Hashirama healed at a rate that was particularly unusual amongst humans. “Did you eat something bad?”

“No,” Hashirama whined. “I’m just trying to work out how to explain to you that teasing someone like that isn’t nice, even if you enjoy it. Madara was very upset just now.”

Tobirama didn’t understand. “I was under the impression that he likes being cross. He does it an awful lot, and he’s very attractive when he’s angry. Not many people can pull that off.”

Hashirama made a choking sound and fell off his chair with a thud. “_Tobi_,” he said from the floor, sounding utterly scandalised.

Tobirama fixed him with his most unimpressed stare. “What?”

“You’re too young to be thinking about things like that! You’re my baby brother!”

Tobirama was quite certain that his offspring had had offspring by the time he reached the dragon gate at the origin of the Nakano, having engaged in spawning behaviour for the first time when he was three, with a rather vicious female carp maybe five hundred miles upstream from here. By now, providing they survived to maturity and not been eaten immediately, it was entirely possible he had sixth generation offspring swimming about in the great river.

He told this to Hashirama, who covered his ears and started to hum loudly where he sat on the floor.

“You’re a hypocrite, anija,” Tobirama said to Hashirama, even though he wasn’t listening. “You’re getting married to that Uzumaki woman in the spring, and the elders will expect you to produce an heir sooner rather than later. You’re only two years older than me, and we’re both done with that disgusting human puberty business. I don’t see why you find it so upsetting that I might be interested in mating with other humans.”

Hashirama kept humming, loudly and off key, so Tobirama got up and left for his own office.

He had a stack of paperwork various people had foisted off on him, as well as the work he had assigned himself, to get through before the afternoon was over. Tobirama did not have the same allergy to paperwork that Hashirama claimed to be afflicted by. The dragon didn’t believe was a real allergy in the slightest, especially since they didn’t use parchment made from animal skin anymore, and instead worked on bamboo scrolls and rice paper, which Hashirama should have no problem with since he was basically just a walking tree at this point. Indeed, the only parchment documents in the village were very old technique scrolls kept in a special archive they had excavated out of the cliff face, complete with temperature control seals every dozen feet to regulate the humidity and prevent the onset of mould.

It was safe to say that, so long as he didn’t have to spend his entire day cooped up inside like a fish in a bowl, Tobirama actually enjoyed doing paperwork. He liked the smell of the paper and the ink, the warmth of the room, the sound of a new scroll crackling a little as he unrolled it, the noise paper made when he shuffled it. He was particularly fond of anything that provided a problem which required him to come up with new and interesting solutions, like how they could go about ensuring there was access to clean running water in each and every dwelling in the village.

Plumbing was fascinating!

So was electricity!

Taxes!

Law! Peace treaties. Binding agreements. Establishing a standardised process for the court martial of village shinobi who worked against the best interests of Konoha depending on the severity of their crime, after the Torture and Interrogation department had completed their assessment. The delicate balancing act of clan law and village law, now that the Uchiha and the Senju weren’t just the only clans living in Konoha.

Tobirama thought it was such a shame that no one else was as interested in the finicky details as he was, because they were so interesting if someone just cared to look.

Anyway, whenever someone found themselves with a task they found too daunting, or boring, or both, it would somehow find its way to Tobirama’s desk. And then it would get done, the requisite paperwork filled out in triplicate and filed in precisely the right location. There was no shinobi in the village above taking advantage of the right-hand corner of Tobirama’s desk when it suited him, or her.

Madara wandered in about four hours before sundown. Tobirama had made considerable headway through his pile of unfinished work, and was cheerfully deciphering a coded report from a Nara shinobi regarding a recent mission to the Land of Wind.

“Hello, Madara,” Tobirama said, without looking up from the report. “Was there something you needed?”

Madara made a harrumphing noise. “I want my work back. Apparently Izuna dumped the lot on your desk after I – left earlier.”

Tobirama blinked. “Oh. I didn’t notice.” He made a thoughtful sound, riffling through the papers and scrolls on his desk.

“Some shinobi you are.”

“I’m only a shinobi when I want to be,” the dragon told him, tartly. “I’m lots of other things, besides. What was it you were working on?”

“The allotment of farmland. Effluent water regulations. Building consent in the commercial districts.”

Tobirama sat back to look at Madara. “Saa, that’s the sort of thing people usually put on my desk because they don’t want to deal with it themselves. I didn’t even think about it… Anyway I’ve finished it for you. Here are the copies that need to be taken down to the archives. I haven’t had time to go down and file them yet.”

Madara snatched the papers Tobirama proffered, scowled deeply and muttering under his breath as he flicked through them. Then he paused. “These are – this is exactly what I was going to do. You didn’t mess it up deliberately. I don’t have to start all over again, and go around chasing people to fix anything.”

“Why would I ruin your work?” Tobirama asked.

“Because it’s _mine_,” Madara snarled, slamming his hands down on the desk to loom over him threateningly.

Tobirama sat back a little. “Yes, and? What would that have to do with it?”

“You—” Madara uttered a wordless screech of frustration, spun on his heel, and started to stomp for the door. Then he changed his mind and came stomping right back.

“You’re crumpling your work,” Tobirama pointed out, helpfully, because it would be a pain for anyone to have to copy it out again because it couldn’t be archived it was all scrunched up.

Madara actually left this time.

# Inarizushi

“Madara-jiji,” Kagami said over a breakfast of rice and egg, bright and early one wintry morning, while Madara was still kneeling at their little table, eyes half open, hands clasped around a mug of steaming tea.

“I’m not that old,” Madara groused, but it was a half-hearted thing at best. The brat, Kagami, had been born about a year before the official ceasefire between the Uchiha and the Senju, and then both of his parents had died in the final battle that almost took Izuna’s life. For a while he’d been housed by a family that had another young child, because he had needed a wet nurse, but after he was weaned he had been unceremoniously handed off to the Clan Head to deal with.

Madara had looked over the broken and scattered families that made up the Uchiha, and had not been able to find parents or siblings who were not grieving for one loss or another. As much as the small boy needed a family, so too did the rest of the clan need space to mourn.

So he’d taken the boy in as his ward.

He didn’t regret this decision, as such, but Kagami and Izuna got on a little too well, and now that Kagami was five he was something of an irreverent monster with no regard for his elders whatsoever. He was also a happy child, one who smiled freely and easily in spite of his loss early on, who felt safe in his environs, and would not begin training to become a shinobi until they finished hashing out the academy curriculum, which wasn’t likely to happen until next year.

Kagami giggled. “You _are_ that old!” he said.

Madara vaguely recalled a very distant time in his past when he was five and tried to remember if he’d thought that twenty-seven had seemed as ancient to him then as Kagami seemed to think it was now. Then he blinked because the life expectancy of a shinobi was so poor he was practically geriatric, for all that he was physically in the prime of his life. “Huh. Maybe I am,” he mused. “You want something, brat, or did you just decide to wake me up by insulting me?”

Kagami grinned. He was missing one of his top front teeth. “I want to know if you know when Kanshougyo-sama is going to visit next!”

This was a commonly asked question not just by Kagami, but by many people, both from within the clan and from without.

Madara sincerely wanted to hate Senju Tobirama. His best friend’s brother had caused him no end of headaches, starting years before he appeared in the Uchiha Compound to heal Izuna – although that had been the event that secured his position in Madara’s life for the foreseeable future.

It started when he arrived in the middle of the night to speak to the tengu, which Madara had brushed off as a dream, right up until he appeared again a couple of weeks later to ask Madara if he could harvest some of the bark from the grove of white mulberry trees because one of his little cousins was having bad summer allergies and he needed something to ease her wheezing. And then he was back a month later to say hello to the koi in the pond.

Before long, he was a regular visitor at the Uchiha Clan Compound, and Madara hadn’t known what to do with him because he was Hashirama’s brother but he also wasn’t human.

Then he ran Izuna through, and Madara had thought that was the end of it.

Until the great white dragon spiralled out of the sky in the middle of the afternoon, as the clan sat vigil for their dying heir. Madara had very nearly shouted at Tobirama to go away, but then he’d introduced himself as Kanshougyo and announced that he’d come to heal Izuna. And heal Izuna he had, hunching over Madara’s little brother with sweat on his brow and glowing green hands for a day and a night and most of the following morning besides, fixing the damage to Izuna’s lung and purging the old blood and pus from his airways so he could breathe again.

Then, even though it went above and beyond what he had set out to do, reversing the rejection of Madara’s eyes after the transplant, which was arguably the most difficult part of the entire operation.

Madara might have been inclined to feel indebted to him, if he hadn’t been the one to injure Izuna in the first place.

Of course, showing up as he had meant the Uchiha thought they had some sort of celestial blessing.

For a brief moment after the dragon’s departure, the elders had called to renew the war with increased. Surely, after they had been blessed in this way, it meant that the spirits wanted the Uchiha to win the war.

But Tobirama’s last words before he flew away had been to ask for peace.

Madara had long suspected that Tobirama was not the bloodthirsty wolf he appeared on the battlefield. He fought to defend, and otherwise attempted to look like he was taking the war seriously, but if he truly wanted the Uchiha dead he could have assassinated them at any time, a monster with teeth and claws and deadly sharp antlers that could descend upon them from the sky in the nighttime and slip through the compound silent and lethal.

So Madara told the elders where they could put their ideas for war, that celestial dragon told them to stop fighting the Senju, and then he defiantly wrote to Hashirama requesting a ceasefire.

Now Madara sat at his table nursing a cup of tea and found he had achieved his childhood dream. His village was built, and growing stronger by the day. Izuna was alive, and as safe as he could be as an adult shinobi who was on the active mission roster. The children did not have to be shinobi if they did not want to be – they could do anything they wanted to. And no longer were they having kunai placed in their hands as soon as they could walk and talk and sent out to die.

In a way, Kagami was his dream come to life.

The little scamp had two dozen other young friends from almost as many major, and minor, clans. During the day, when Madara was working, or off on a mission, he roamed the streets of the village, under the watchful gaze of the chuunin on guard scattered across the rooftops. He played, and learned his kana and kanji and numbers.

Kagami did not know the stickiness of a man’s blood on his hands, the way it wouldn’t come out from under his fingernails. He did not know the stink of piss and faeces and vomit, blood and the acrid eye-stinging smoke of a warzone after shinobi had clashed there. Did not know what a man sounded like as he died in agony, had never seen the way someone’s eyes glazed as their guts spilled onto the earth.

Kagami wanted to be a shinobi, so he would learn.

Eventually.

But by the time Madara was five he already _knew_.

Konoha was Hashirama’s dream, too. A safe place, a village where they protected each other, where his brothers Itama and Kawarama could heal and his little cousins could grow as Kagami did, without the threat of their own mortality hanging above their heads every single day.

If _only_ it weren’t for stupid Tobirama’s stupid meddling.

Because other clans flocked to the village when they heard about the celestial dragon that had advocated its creation. Some were invited to stay. Others were asked, more or less politely, to leave and never return because their ideals to not hold true to the values Konoha was built upon.

And everyone wanted to know about Kanshougyo. Since the dragon had spoken the most to Madara of anyone, this made him somehow its unofficial envoy, which was very, very annoying. Madara hated answering the exact same series of questions again and again and again. Yes, the dragon was real. No, it didn’t say when it was coming back. No, he didn’t know why it chose to visit the Uchiha to pass on its message of peace. It made no sense to him either. Yes, it was magnificent.

He was sorely tempted to tell everyone that Kanshougyo had looked a bit like a half-drowned weasel and not a majestic creature of glittering silver scales and glowing red eyes and long flowing hair.

“Perhaps during Obon,” Madara suggested, hoping that by giving a date almost six months away Kagami might forget, and his disappointment when the dragon didn’t show up because it was an ornery bastard would be minimal.

“Aw. That’s forever,” Kagami whined.

Yes, that was the point.

Madara finished his tea. “I should go,” he decided, getting to his feet. “Behave. Don’t go chasing the ninneko anymore, or you’ll get more than just a warning scratch.”

“Yes, Madara-jiji. Have a good day!”

He met up with Tobirama during his walk to the Hokage Tower. That irritating, infuriating man who was physically incapable of smiling, but who Madara knew was happy when his expression softened, handed him a bento, and said: “I made your favourite.”

Madara peeked inside and saw that there were indeed three pieces of inarizushi nestled between pickled vegetables on one side and grilled fish on the other. He made a vague noise of acknowledgement, before asking: “What did you bring for Hashirama?”

“Carp, fresh from the river,” Tobirama replied with a sort of quiet but malicious glee that Madara couldn’t help but appreciate.

“He thinks they’re your _children_, Senju.”

“They’re _fish_, Uchiha. And if he doesn’t want it, he’ll stop making me cook for him.”

Madara snorted, then composed himself as they reached the hallway their offices branched off from. “Tobirama. I might have told Kagami that he could expect to see Kanshougyo at Obon. I’ll leave that up to you, though. Don’t go humouring the brat for my sake.”

Tobirama nodded. “I’ll think about it.”

Madara left him, feeling quite cheerful, right up until the moment when Hashirama came to find him to go over another request from the Shimura Clan regarding special dispensation to continue to operate solely under clan law, should they decide to join Konoha in the first place – at which point he found his customary foul mood descending once again.

He and Tobirama argued more days than they didn’t, and Madara often found that he dearly wanted to hate his best friend’s brother for the sheer _inconvenience_ the white demon caused him. Most of the time, however, he found Tobirama… not intolerable. Madara was even a little bit sad that with the advent of the creation of the Hiraishin, Tobirama had stopped popping up naked in unexpected locations, though that was something Madara didn’t want to think too hard about lest he come to conclusions he didn’t like about himself.

# Uzumaki Mito

The contingent of shinobi coming from Uzushio to Konoha for the political wedding between Uzumaki Mito, the princess of the Uzumaki, and Senju Hashirama, the Hokage of Konohagakure no Sato and Clan Head of the mighty Senju, were accompanied by an escort of six Konoha shinobi.

Two were Senju. One was Hashirama’s own younger brother, nineteen-year-old Senju Kawarama, a competent shinobi in spite of the fact his dominant arm ended abruptly at the elbow and he moved with a limp. After his injuries he had mostly stayed off the battlefront during the Senju-Uchiha war, and had instead made himself a name as a solo assassin, often adopting the guise of a poor beggar to appear harmless in order to get closer to his marks before killing them cleanly and disappearing. Mito had met him once before, and once only, when he was a little under a year old. He had been sitting on his mother’s knee, trying to shove his own foot into his mouth, while Itama, not yet three, had hid behind his mother’s skirts.

Mito found the adult Kawarama polite, but a little shy, and he seemed awed by the grandeur of the red slate and white marble of Uzushio.

The other Senju was Touka, thirty, Hashirama’s first cousin. She was old for a shinobi but an otherwise loud and youthful woman. She was unlike her quiet cousin, having made her name on the front lines as a master of genjutsu, so proficient she could rival even the Sharingan. She didn’t seem to care much for formality, and never referred to Hashirama as _Hokage-sama_.

“Don’t get me wrong, my little cousin is immensely powerful and a very good leader. His dedication to his people is almost unrivalled,” she admitted to Mito when asked about her irreverence. “But I find it hard to take him seriously when I remember rubbing mud into his hair when he was three.”

Uchiha Izuna, who was the third member of the group of escort shinobi from Konoha, and was lingering nearby, had snorted in amusement at that, then tried valiantly to pretend he hadn’t when Touka shot him a furious glance.

It was odd to have two Senju and an Uchiha in her escort, after their generations-long war.

Odder were the barbs Touka and Izuna traded almost perfunctorily, in a way which reminded Mito more of children pulling on each other’s hair than enemy clans being forced to work together after centuries of hatred. Truly, Hashirama must have worked wonders to have achieved this.

The other three members of her escort were a neutral party, though they seemed to be standard enough shinobi. The Uzumaki rarely dealt with their clans, having no formal or informal alliance. The Yamanaka, Nara, and Akimichi were a trio of symbiotic clans that had long been allied to one another, and Mito found the highly traditional and rather legendary Ino-Shika-Cho trio assigned to her to be an amiable, reputedly skilled, but somewhat lazy group.

Somehow, travelling to Konoha with the six of them was less hardship than she anticipated.

Each and every one of the Konoha shinobi approached her individually, however, to tell Mito what was, in essence, the exact same thing. She was tempted to find it amusing. However, the fact that six different people felt the need to give her the same warning was, perhaps, just a little concerning about the state of affairs in Konoha. None of them had anything worrisome to report to her about Hashirama, he future husband, but every single one of them, including the perpetually sleepy Nara and the distracted Yamanaka who was more interested in the vegetation they were passing than anything else, told her to steer clear of the Uchiha Clan Head, Madara, and her own future brother-in-law, Tobirama.

“They despise each other,” Touka informed Mito seriously. “Never get in the way of one of their arguments, or you’ll regret it. Tobirama almost killed Izuna near the end of the war, and it was only the intervention of Kanshougyo-sama that saved his life. Madara’s never forgotten it, and Tobirama – well, he reminds me a lot of my uncle. Butsuma. Not in a good way. They drive each other up the walls.”

“They argue so loud you can hear them across the village,” Nara Shikakazu complained, rubbing his eye as he stumbled along next to Mito’s palanquin. Mito was walking beside him, because she frankly couldn’t stand riding in the thing, but appearances must be kept up, and she would arrive in Konoha in it. “I can’t sleep when they’re fighting. Otou-sama says attending a meeting of the Clan Heads with them is _troublesome_. I can believe him.”

“I don’t know why Hashirama-sama doesn’t put a stop to it,” Yamanaka Inoko mused, examining the collection of poisonous flowers she was arranging into a bouquet. She was wearing gloves to handle them. Mito didn’t especially want to know who they were for. “The constant strife between the Hokage’s apparent dearest friend and the oldest of his brothers is… straining for morale. Everyone thinks one or the other of them is going to snap one of these days, and we’ll all die in the fallout.” Mito later caught Izuna offering this bouquet to Touka, who seemed touched by the gesture. Later still, they could be found with their hands wrapped in bandages to keep them from scratching at themselves.

“Madara’s insane,” Kawarama said, quiet and serious. He shrugged. “Tobi-ani is, too, though. Tobi-ani once raised the dead just because he wanted to ask our great grandfather something. Try and pretend they aren’t there. They’re not serious. If they ever got serious, the whole village would be razed to the earth within minutes.”

“If they’re both within a hundred yards of me, I can’t eat,” Akimichi Chouka said, her usually cheerful face unusually sombre. “I’m not a sensor or anything, but I suddenly can’t swallow anymore. You just _know_. Look, all I’m saying is, don’t hang around with either one unless Hashirama is around to break them up. That’s how you stay safe.”

“They’re courting,” Izuna told Mito plainly, an expression of frank disgust crossing his face. When Mito simply raised her eyebrows at him, because this was not what the others had implied _at all_, he said: “What? It’s not that hard to believe, is it? They’re just – nii-san is weird, and I don’t even _know_ what the white demon is. Please, whatever you do, _ignore them_.”

When they finally began to approach Konohagakure no Sato, the Village Hidden in the Leaves, aptly named by none other than Uchiha Madara himself, Mito could see no hint of the chaos she was expecting through the curtains over the window of her palanquin, and she was faintly disappointed for it.

Before long, her palanquin-bearers, Uzumaki shinobi and her own cousins mostly, knelt, and she descended gracefully to join her father’s side in front of the tremendous gate set into the high and sturdy walls that surrounded the village.

Senju Hashirama, her future husband, was awaiting her travelling party there, a wide, doltish grin on his face.

Mito had met him only briefly, years and years before when the war was still raging and Butsuma was still the leader of the Senju Clan, thought he’d grown up to be quite handsome. That was not to say she hadn’t found his ridiculous pinstriped hakama, bowl-cut hair endearing, wild mood swings, and easy smile endearing back then, when they were still children. But now he was tall, clad in the elegant robes and hat of his office, hair a long flowing mane, even as he exuded the same friendliness as he had back when they were both eight years old.

To Hashirama’s right was Uchiha Madara, instantly recognisable for his wild bush of hair, scowl, and the standoffish way he was standing with his shoulders hunched around his ears.

To Hashirama’s left was the Senju brother Mito had never met. Tobirama was almost as tall as Hashirama, but suddenly Izuna’s nickname for him, _the_ _white demon_, made sense for he quite obviously lacked any pigment whatsoever in his hair, skin, or eyes. She had thought, initially, from the descriptions of Tobirama that he might simply take more after their mother, who had had the ashy white hair of a Hatake, but now she knew this was not true.

The rumours she’d heard of the last brother being too sickly to leave home for many years made more sense to her, now.

On Tobirama’s other side stood Itama, a slight young man with a serious face who Mito knew spoke not with his voice but his fingers these days. According to Kawarama, he worked in the newly built hospital as a medic where he had gained a reputation for being silent but fierce.

Arranged around them were various other Clan Heads and dignitaries.

“Hello!” Hashirama called cheerfully, dancing on the spot for a moment like an overeager dog before abandoning his position to come bounding over to greet the Uzumaki party properly. “Did you have a safe trip? Was the weather good? You weren’t attacked, were you? Everyone is safe and accounted for? Oh, uh. Mito-san! You’re – wow.” He flushed a fetching shade of pink, then recalled himself, and turned to her father. “Excuse me, Uzumaki-dono! Allow me to formally welcome you to Konohagakure no Sato! Come, I’ll show you to your accommodation, I grew it myself…”

Mito flicked her fan open to hide a smile.

Hashirama was just as endearing as ever.

Behind his back, Mito caught Madara and Tobirama exchanging weary, commiserating glances.

She would later learn this was because Hashirama had given them the task of running the village on top of their own workloads while he took time off to plan their wedding down to the tiniest, most intricate detail.

And it was a lovely wedding, held a few days later on a clear and sunny morning in one of the neatly manicured parks down near the Nakano, where the cherry trees were in fully bloom.

“I grew the whole park!” Hashirama told her excitedly, as they took their places before the priest and the miko in front of the altar. Hashirama looked perhaps even more stunning in his dark wedding haori than he did in Hokage robes, and he seemed to be trying valiantly not to vibrate out of his own skin. “Do you like it?”

“I love it,” Mito assured him.

Behind the priest, partway obscured by the pale pink cherry blossoms, Mito thought she glimpsed a glittering red eye. Movement.

Hashirama was more concerned with pointing her attention to the altar itself, another of his creations, even as the great white dragon, Kanshougyo, stepped on silent paws out of the trees and settled onto its belly behind the priest.

Mito heard her father gasp, and utter a little prayer of thanks to the heavens, even as Hashirama suddenly spotted the celestial witness of their wedding.

Curiously, her almost-husband wrinkled his nose and fixed the dragon with an unimpressed stare, muttering: “Don’t mind him, Mito-san, he’s just showing off.”

The dragon curled back one of its lips to show off the hint of an enormous canine tooth.

Then Hashirama smiled brightly. “At least he showed up! He said he was busy today.”

“What business do dragons have?” Mito asked quietly.

“Paperwork,” Hashirama replied, serious.

It was a lovely wedding. Mito didn’t know if the fact that it had been presided over by a celestial creature was fortuitous or some sort of omen she should find concerning. By the time of the reception, Kanshougyo had vanished.

The reception was almost as lovely, except Uchiha Madara punched Senju Tobirama in the nose for inquiring about the red and white koi pattern on his formal kimono. Mito had half a mind to be concerned as they began to brawl in the dirt, but Hashirama paid them no attention whatsoever and just sighed at her in a besotted fashion, so she decided to take her lead from him. He was, after all, the resident expert in wrangling both his best friend and his strange brother.

# A Quiet Evening

Madara sat in the shade of the engawa on a late spring afternoon a couple of months after Hashirama’s wedding to the Uzumaki princess. There had been rain that morning, but the skies had cleared around noon, and now it was the perfect time to sit outside and enjoy a moment to read something other than administrative paperwork with a cup of nice tea before he got up to prepare something for dinner.

Izuna sat beside him, a whetstone, small tub of water, and blade oil at hand, inspecting, cleaning, and sharpening his weapons. Some had been set aside to take back to the blacksmith to be melted down for recasting, too damaged to still be of use. The rest were honed to razor sharp edges.

Kagami was asleep in one of the last patches of afternoon sunlight at the other end of the engawa, curled up like a kitten, all worn out from playing with little Hiruzen of the Sarutobi Clan.

“The white demon is approaching,” Izuna said, without looking up. He was working a nick out of his favourite katana with a single-minded devotion, but he was not unaware of his surroundings.

Neither was Madara, and Tobirama was making no effort to mask his chakra as he strolled around the side of the house.

Hikaku, who was Madara and Izuna’s immediate neighbour across the garden, poked his head out of his kitchen window, because even now, years after they had established the village it was unusual for one of the Senju to wander into the Uchiha district, and vice versa. Madara and Hashirama were the obvious exceptions to this, as Hashirama invited himself over all the time, often just to drag Madara back to his house to share a meal with his family. Whether Hikaku was checking for danger, or just being nosy was up for interpretation.

“Senju,” Madara greeted Tobirama, peering briefly up from his book before returning to his reading.

“Uchiha,” Tobirama replied, kicking off his sandals and hopping up with a nimble leap to settle beside him. “What are you reading?” Like an overly pushy cat, he immediately attempted to lean over Madara’s shoulder.

“Off,” Madara grumbled, shoving him away. “You can wait two seconds for me to answer you before you climb all over me.”

“I could,” Tobirama said, resettling himself but this time with a couple of inches between them.

Madara turned the page and said nothing.

Silence fell over them, for a time, except for the rasp of Izuna’s katana over the whetstone and him muttering under his breath. Something about a clan with a strange kekkei genkai who used their own bones for their bukijutsu, and blunting his blade on someone’s weaponised humerus, which wasn’t funny.

“I’m reading a collection of the jisei of my ancestors, collated by my maternal grandmother,” Madara told Tobirama, some time later, as the sun dipped behind one of the distant clouds sitting right at the edge of the horizon. The evening air was becoming cool, but not unpleasant.

“Ah,” Tobirama said. “If the Senju ever practiced jisei, any record of it has long since been lost.” He didn’t press closer again, or try to snatch the worn old book from Madara’s hands. “Were you planning on eating at home tonight?”

“Yes,” Madara said, with a sigh. There were some excellent restaurants appearing in Konoha now. Some were operated by civilians. Others had been opened to the public by the Akimichi. With the influx of clans from all over the Land of Fire, and further abroad, many of whom brought with them crops and livestock that had not been available to either the Uchiha or the Senju, taking lunch and dinner was something of a culinary adventure. Hashirama, who often accompanied Madara and Tobirama when they went out to eat, was always prompting them to try new things.

Madara already knew he very much didn’t enjoy eating roe, and that Hashirama had a profound aversion to carp, thanks largely to the abundance of fish in the Nakano. It had been fascinating to watch Hashirama discover a new distaste for green peppers, introduced to him by the Yamanaka Clan Head. Tobirama, on the other hand, had been overcome with revulsion when Hashirama presented him with a dish of imported kusaya – salted and fermented fish from Uzushio – which he had not previously had the chance to try but Hashirama took pleasure in inflicting upon on.

Tobirama had not been with the group of Senju women and children that travelled there to escape a plague sweeping the Land of Fire almost two decades ago, having ostensibly been left behind because he was such a sickly child he wouldn’t have survived the journey. _Ostensibly_, it had been decided it was kinder to let him die at home in bed, not out on the open road. _Ostensibly_ he’d miraculously managed to avoid catching the plague even though it laid low half the remaining clan and killed a third of those who caught it. Of course, Tobirama hadn’t been a boy back then, but a fish, and hadn’t known anything about human plagues.

Regardless, it turned out he wasn’t fond of fermented meat.

“I can cook for you, if you’d rather not tonight,” Tobirama offered, as Madara tucked his book into his obi and gathered up his cup and his teapot.

“You’re a guest,” Madara pointed out, stepping into the darkness of his house.

“I want to talk to you about that, actually,” Tobirama said, trailing him to the kitchen, and flicking the light switch as he went.

Electric lighting was infinitely more convenient than lanterns and candles.

Madara did not find his answer unexpected. Tobirama, he had learned, did not tend to subscribe to traditional etiquette. Something could have been done since time immemorial, but if Tobirama couldn’t see the reason for it, then he either wouldn’t do it, or would have to be consistently reminded. Case in point – he’d left his sandals on the path by Madara’s engawa and invited himself inside in bare feet.

Madara made a mental note to go and pick them up and put them in the genkan in case it rained or one of the cats swiped them.

“Do what you will,” he said, opening the electronic ice box for food and selecting some pork Izuna must have purchased today because it hadn’t been there yesterday. He turned around to find Tobirama had already pulled the rice out of the cupboard, and was roughly estimating how much they would need for four people while a pot of water was set on the stove to heat.

“Oh, good,” Tobirama said. “Because Mito and Hashirama have decided they like each other rather a lot, and have begun to mate like rabbits in the spring. They’ve already driven Itama and Kawarama to the furthest room, but it was originally a cupboard, and well. I need somewhere else to live.”

Madara pinched the bridge of his nose. He’d been having such a wonderful evening, too.

“Let me try to understand. Your first thought upon being driven from your own home amongst the Senju, where I’m sure any one of them would have taken you in, you being the current heir and all, was to decide to come all the way across the village and move into the home of the Clan Head of your ancestral enemies.”

Tobirama considered that for a moment. “No,” he said. “I decided I wanted to move in with you because I like you, and you _know_ me. Apart from my brothers, you and Izuna are the only ones who are aware of what I am.”

Madara suddenly found himself looking not at Senju Tobirama, Hashirama’s eternally frustrating younger brother – the one who liked to push all his buttons until he was so angry he was sure there was steam rising from his face, goad Madara into attacking him, and then whisper dirty things in his ear so he was flushed not from anger but from something else entirely.

He was looking at the man who had not been born as a man, who was _not_ a man, strictly speaking, who hid himself behind the façade of humanity for reasons Madara did not truly understand but was genuinely invested in the Senju and the Uchiha and Konohagakure no Sato as a whole. Tobirama didn’t have to be – he could fly away and leave it all behind on a whim – and he remained for the people, as far as Madara could see.

He was looking at the celestial being looking back at him through a mask who had, for reasons inexplicable to Madara, chosen to begin courting him.

“You are welcome in my home for as long as you wish to remain,” Madara told him, even though he had a sudden feeling that giving Tobirama carte blanche over his position in his household might come back to bite him in the future.

Tobirama did not smile, because he never smiled, but his expression became soft. It was the equivalent of a smile. “Thank you.” A wicked glint entered his eye. “Am I welcome in your bed, too?”

Madara made a wordless gurgling noise, and thrust the packet of pork wrapped in waxed paper at him. Bit him already. “You can cook,” he decided.

“What happened to your sense of hospitality?” Tobirama asked, watching as he stomped out of the kitchen into the other room.

“It disappeared when you stopped being a guest,” Madara replied.

Tobirama just shrugged. “Saa, that makes sense.”

Madara was grudgingly willing to admit that Tobirama was a decent cook. Good enough that he’d never once poisoned Madara, neither deliberately nor accidentally, in all the time he’d been bringing him lunch. Izuna picked at his dinner suspiciously, but Kagami dug in with the voracious appetite of an active child. It was a peaceful meal. Tobirama entertained Kagami with wild tales about snow leopards and strange adventures he’d apparently had all the way up in the Land of Snow, high up in the mountains, where it was possible to go snow blind and sometimes the sun reflecting off the ice felt paradoxically hot while Madara and Izuna spoke quietly of clan affairs.

After, Madara ushered Kagami off to wash up then take a bath before he went to bed because he was dusty from running about outside all day, leaving Izuna and Tobirama to wash up. When he returned from tucking the small boy into his covers, he found Izuna had pulled out the shougi board, and he was teaching Tobirama to play.

Madara knelt beside them to watch the game.

“I find it hard to believe you’ve never played before,” he said to Tobirama, who shrugged.

“I always had other things to do,” Tobirama explained. “I have a vague memory of Butsuma attempting to teach me when I was a small child, shortly after I joined his household, but I wasn’t paying attention.”

Tobirama had never struck Madara as inattentive before. Even now he could see the way the white-haired Senju watched the board in a manner reminiscent of a cat watching a leaf blow down the street – with utmost focus. Each move he made, after analysing Izuna’s and seeing how it affected the rest of the pieces, was with greater understanding and clearer intent.

“I find that hard to believe, too,” Madara scoffed. “You’re good at everything.”

Tobirama made a thoughtful sound at the back of his throat. “Not,” he said, shifting his general to take Izuna’s rook. “If I’m seven years old, I’ve just spent an entire morning being drilled on the importance of obeying my elders and paying attention to my teacher, and I’m trying to work out how to excuse myself from a person who is both my elder and my teacher, because I need to relieve myself rather badly. Butsuma thought I wasn’t housebroken. The whole thing was terribly embarrassing.”

Madara bit the inside of his cheek. “I see,” he said, in a sort of feeble, breathless way.

Izuna wasn’t nearly so polite as he let out a startled braying laugh and doubled over, trying to contain himself so he didn’t wake Kagami. In that moment of inattentiveness, Madara watched Tobirama quickly switch a few pieces around on the board, putting himself in a better position than before, then casting a sly, almost sultry, glance in the Uchiha Clan Head’s direction.

Madara choked on his own saliva.

# The Hokage’s Inexplicable Bad Mood

Mito was pregnant and Tobirama was worried.

Not for Mito.

Mito was coping with her pregnancy extremely well, and experiencing minimal difficulty. The Uzumaki were said to be a clan with exceptional vitality. They aged slower, healed faster, and were less prone to illness. Whether this was because of their enormous chakra reserves, or some sort of incident of environment or genetics otherwise separate from their chakra was not known. Regardless, the good health of the Uzumaki seemed to lend itself to easy, uncomplicated pregnancy. Mito was not suffering sickness in the mornings and was radiantly happy.

Rather, Tobirama was worried for his brother.

Hashirama should have been ecstatic.

Over the past few weeks, however, almost since Tobirama began to cohabit with Madara and his little ward, Hashirama had become increasingly quiet and withdrawn. Never one for pensive silences or sitting in contemplation while others talked around him, this was now how Hashirama spent most of his time.

The silver dragon might have thought his older brother had been replaced with an imposter who didn’t know how Senju Hashirama behaved – if both his nose and his sense of chakra didn’t tell him otherwise. This sombre, thoughtful, tired-looking man was, in fact, Hashirama.

Tobirama entertained the idea that perhaps Hashirama was sick, only his nose was sharp, and he knew the smells of illness. Of fever and dehydration, fester, necrosis, and malignancy. Hashirama smelled like none of these things. Along with all the usual human odours, Hashirama smelled like warm earth and pine sap and the leaves of oak trees in summer, but not sickness.

Madara smelled like a forest fire, like hot ashes and stinging smoke, and sometimes it was like the rest of him was being eaten up by the burning smells. Those days, the ones where Madara smelled like he was being burned up by himself, were the days when he shut Tobirama out of his room, out of his house, and if the dragon pressed he would throw kunai and shuriken at him. They weren’t good days, but Tobirama was getting better at anticipating them. He’d learned he could head them off, he just had to make sure Madara came out of his room to eat and say hello to Kagami and see Izuna.

He wasn’t sure how to help his brother out of his melancholic slump, though, because although Hashirama was often beset by low moods, they tended to lift as quickly as they came on. The only other times he had spent any amount of time in protracted misery, it had been after the clan, or their immediate family, had suffered some sort of loss.

But the Senju were thriving. The _village_ was thriving.

So why did Hashirama’s chakra feel like despair to Tobirama?

The dragon-turned-man was sitting at a low table in the corner of Hashirama’s office at the Hokage Tower with a stack of his own work one warm early-summer morning. The window was open allowing a pleasant breeze in, and Tobirama was getting his work done at a steady pace.

Tobirama tended to sit there one day a week to unofficially review the Hokage’s workload, and make a list of which tasks he would have to take on himself or delegate to others, since Hashirama was… less diligent about paperwork than Tobirama was.

Only, halfway through the morning Tobirama heard Hashirama heave a long, drawn out sigh, and shuffle something off to the side of his desk. No further sounds of his brush being dipped in his ink pot, or drawn across a page, followed. Tobirama decided to let him have a break – Hashirama often took a few minutes to stare out the window in thought, but if ten had gone past and he hadn’t got back to work then he was going to reprimand his brother for failing to do his job.

Some time passed.

Tobirama continued reading through the final revision of the proposed curriculum for the academy for potential shinobi, decided at long last he was happy with it – after a great deal of squabbling with the different clans over what would and wouldn’t be taught – and signed off on it, as well as the group of suggested senseis, who he had spent last week interviewing in depths, searching for signs of prejudice. He was very happy with the result.

But Hashirama had not go back to working.

Tobirama looked up at him at last.

His older brother had elbows on his desk, his fingers laced together, chin resting on his hands as he stared off into the middle distance in the vague direction of the other corner of the office, where a squat cactus sat in a gaudy orange pot. All his paperwork was sitting in his out tray, his brush had been neatly placed in its holder, and his ink pot was capped.

Tobirama frowned.

Hashirama… was _finished_? It wasn’t even lunch time yet! He couldn’t be done! He’d had enough work on his desk to keep him occupied all week.

“Anija, if you’ve run out of work, I’ve got a whole stack more here.”

Hashirama started lightly. “Oh,” he said, in a distracted sort of way. “Yes, thank you, Tobirama.”

Feeling more worried than ever, and to test a hypothesis, Tobirama got up and handed Hashirama his entire stack of unfinished tasks. This should have made Hashirama baulk and try to come up with some feeble excuse for why he needed to leave the office _right now!_ Instead, he gave Tobirama a wan smile and pulled the first scroll off the stack, opening it up and read the contents.

Panic swelled in Tobirama’s chest. “Anija, do you know what that is?”

Hashirama hummed. “A report on the reliability of the grading of imported steel,” he said.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit—” Tobirama shuddered to say it, because he personally thought it was fascinating. “—Boring?”

“No.”

“Anija, are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Tobi. Everything’s fine. I’ve already told you that,” Hashirama said, absently, reaching for his abacus to work something out.

Tobirama had always enjoyed sitting in the same room as someone who was using an abacus. He liked the clinking of the little wooden beads, the quiet mutterings as the other person slowly worked through figures. The dragon would not allow himself to become distracted, however, and he fixed Hashirama with a leery stare.

“Something is bothering you, anija, and it’s obvious to everyone. You’re acting so unlike yourself that I’m almost tempted to check you for puppet seals or genjutsu, only I can’t think of any reason why someone controlling you would make you do paperwork when everyone knows you’d rather clean latrines than read a report.” Were he anyone else, Tobirama might have paced, but he a creature inclined to economy of movement, so he stood before Hashirama’s desk, laying out his argument for exactly why he thought something was bothering his brother. “I’ve had to assure a half-dozen different clan heads that you’re not getting the village in order because you’re dying. Morale is terrible. You would’ve noticed yourself, if you didn’t spend all your time holed up in here or sitting at home staring into space. Have you even noticed that a third of the administrative staff haven’t come in this week? You’ve been doing all their work. I keep running out of things to put on your desk. And now you’re doing _my_ work.”

“I’m _fine_, Tobirama,” Hashirama said, in the sort of authoritative tone that he had sometimes used during the direst of moments on the battlefield. It was one that suggested heavily that the subject was closed.

Tobirama narrowed his eyes dangerously. Hashirama didn’t see it, because he had already turned his gaze back to the report on the reliability of the grading of imported steel.

“Is this because Mito-san is expecting?” Tobirama asked.

“No,” Hashirama replied, without glancing up.

“So, you aren’t worried that I’ll eat your offspring.”

Hashirama dropped his brush. It rolled off the desk onto the floor, flicking ink halfway across the room. “_What?_”

That was apparently not it, from Hashirama’s reaction. Tobirama scratched his head, figuratively, as he tried to work out what else could have put Hashirama in such a funk. It wasn’t personal loss, it wasn’t worry for Mito or her child. There had been other hidden villages popping up in the Elemental Nations over the past few years, but none were so well established as Konohagakure no Sato, and Tobirama had heard no rumblings of war.

“How could you think so terribly of me, Tobi?” Hashirama asked. “I trust you!”

Tobirama shrugged. “Butsuma was concerned I would attempt to eat Itama and Kawarama, back when I first joined the household, and they were very small.”

“I’m not like chichi-ue!” Hashirama grabbed his own hair to tug on despairingly.

“No,” Tobirama agreed. “But it is a valid concern, if you look at it the right way. I was just making sure that wasn’t what had you so upset.”

Hashirama groaned, his head hitting the desk with a thud. “I’m _fine_, Tobi. I still – how could you even think—?”

“I ruled out all of my other theories as to why you were acting strange,” Tobirama replied.

“Ugh. I have a lot of work to do. If you’re not going to be serious, you can go away, you’re distracting me.”

Bemused, because the only work Hashirama had to do was actually Tobirama’s, Tobirama acknowledged the dismissal for what it was, and left Hashirama’s office. Then, in a turn of events most unfortunate, he looked into his own office to discover that no one had been in to leave behind anything else for him to do, so he left the Hokage Tower altogether and went home.

He was still worried, now more than ever.

# The SSS-Ranked Mission

“Anija,” Tobirama said, glancing briefly at the contents of the mission scroll that Madara had read and then passed to him. “We don’t use this mission ranking – not even ANBU use it.” Tobirama knew this for a fact, because he’d been working diligently for some years first on the concept and then the implementation of Konoha’s special covert operations division. He was one of the few people apart from the Hokage himself who knew who the ANBU Commander was beneath their mask, because he’d been the one to scout them in the first place.

Hashirama linked his fingers and rested his chin upon them, his elbows on his desk, his face serious, as it usually was these days. There was something determined in his expression, though, something that had not been there before.

Tobirama now realised that Hashirama had seemed lost during the previous weeks.

Hashirama was not lost now.

The Hokage of Konohagakure no Sato had made up his mind about whatever had been troubling him.

Madara let out an aggrieved growl. “Read the scroll before you start debating semantics, idiot Senju.”

“I did. And I still don’t see why he’s labelled it an SSS mission.”

Reduced to snarling in wordless frustration, Madara learned across Hashirama’s desk to run his finger over the hidden privacy seals by Hashirama’s left knee. Tobirama knew they were there because he’d designed them and then drawn them out for Hashirama to copy into the grains of the wood as he grew the desk using Mokuton. There was a little flicker at the edge of Tobirama’s senses, as the other seals in the privacy matrix, hidden in the walls and the windowpanes, activated with Madara’s chakra.

The office appeared no different, from the inside, but people outside of it would hear nothing but indistinct sounds no matter how closely they listened. Now would anyone peering in through the window be able to focus well enough to read.

Madara whirled on Tobirama. “This isn’t the assassination of the Daimyou,” he spat. “This is the _Shougun_.”

“I maintain that an ordinary S ranking would have been sufficient.”

“You have no other objections?” Hashirama asked.

Tobirama looked at the mission scroll again, in case he had overlooked or misread a word in some way that would render its meaning different. No. Apart from the mislabelling of the rank right at the top of the scroll, it appeared to be an ordinary mission, albeit of the very secret variety that few outside the village’s elite would get to see. There were all the standard clauses for assassination missions, as well as a few non-standard but sensible ones.

They were to either eliminate the target in utmost secrecy or eliminate the witnesses.

Physical confirmation of the assassination was not necessary – they didn’t need to bring the target’s head back in a storage scroll – because of his status word of his demise should spread quickly, as it had with his predecessors.

How they got close to the target was up to their discretion, however they were not to leave any trail that might lead back to Konohagakure no Sato. If they did, they would be branded traitors to the village, exiled forever, and hefty enough prices placed upon their heads that would mean any shinobi with a hint of greed in his heart would attempt to cash it in, so they would functionally be hunted forever. Should they return to Konoha, it would be upon pain of swift and vicious death. That was new, but sensible because if they failed to be discreet it allowed Konoha to cut ties with them in a way that looked clean, hopefully preventing massive retaliation.

“I don’t,” Tobirama said. “It all seems straightforward enough to me.”

“Ugh,” Madara scoffed. “Your brother has only asked you to kill the most powerful man in the world.”

“We’re shinobi,” Tobirama pointed out. “And at the end of the day he is just another human. You all bleed the same.”

“And his men are samurai – we can’t underestimate them,” Madara countered.

Samurai, Tobirama knew, were just as capable of moulding chakra as any shinobi. They simply did so differently, channelling it through weapons rather than hand signs.

Tobirama raised his eyebrows. “We?”

Madara huffed, folding his arms and tucking his chin into the high collar of his shirt. “Well, I’m not letting you go alone. Anyway, it’s been two centuries since the last Shougun employed shinobi as well as samurai. Our intelligence on the current Shougun is patchy, at best. Actually—” he rounded on Hashirama. “This is unlike you. Mind explaining why you’ve suddenly decided to make a pre-emptive strike against a neutral party, _Hokage-sama_?”

Hashirama inhaled slowly, thoughtfully. Regarded Madara and Tobirama carefully. “Minami-dono is no longer neutral.”

“What did you do to offend him, you blithering idiot?” Madara demanded.

“He founded a village,” Tobirama replied. “You helped.”

“And you forced my hand, you stupid dragon!”

They promptly began to argue about the reasoning of a man neither of them had met. Tobirama thought if Minami Ryuichi, the leader of the military world, had turned his attention to Konoha, it was because he viewed Konoha as a legitimate threat to his dominance of this part of the world. How dangerous were the shinobi clans when they were ununited, squabbling amongst each other, and only occasionally hired on by the Daimyou to harass each other in their perpetual jostling for power beneath the Shougun?

They were nothing, little more than disorganised rabble, for all that their battles could alter the landscape forever.

Because they were individual mercenary clans, often nomadic, with no true ties to each other.

A village, though. A village where dozens of clans stood as a united front, founded by the infamous Senju and Uchiha, whose feud was known for miles. A village that was rapidly expanding, the ranks of battle-ready shinobi growing to number amongst the thousands.

That was a threat.

On the other hand, Hashirama tended to need help with issues of diplomacy – Madara was not incorrect in his assumption that he could have turned a neutral party into an immediate threat just by being his usual self. Hashirama was either too willing to let himself be walked all over, or he put his foot in his mouth somehow. It was plausible that he had received communication from the Shougun, replied without thinking deeply enough about it, and then.

Well.

Madara began shouting.

Tobirama, not to be outdone, also began to shout his opinions.

They leaned up in each other’s faces, until they were only a couple of inches apart, snapping and snarling, eyes flashing dangerously, with each successful riposte, each well-made argument, each shrieking disagreement.

Out the corner of his eye, Tobirama watched his brother groan and pinch the bridge of his nose, as if he were developing a headache. “Why do you hate each other so much?” he wailed to himself, slumping in his chair. “Why can’t two of my most precious people get along?”

Madara, whose mouth was open to deliver some sort of reply fierce with vitriol, closed his mouth so quickly his teeth clicked. He turned. “What nonsense are you spouting now? We get along fine.”

“It’s true, anija,” Tobirama agreed. “We just realised that this is the best way to find flaws in our ideas, make us think things through all the way. Look, Madara isn’t even all red, shame as it is.”

“So you scream at each other?” Hashirama asked, looking from one to the other with a sort of bewilderment.

“It’s cathartic,” Madara added.

“He carries around all this tension,” Tobirama agreed. “Nothing like yelling until you’re hoarse to help when even sparring doesn’t shift it.”

“I assume you’re going to tell us why the Shougun is no longer neutral towards Konoha, however,” Madara said.

Hashirama slumped in his chair, looking like a scolded dog.

“_Did_ you do something to him?” Tobirama asked. “I wouldn’t have picked that.”

“I didn’t,” Hashirama said, quietly. Then he amended himself. “I mean, I _did_. But he started it! He wants Konoha to kill Kanshougyo during Obon, since that’s Kanshougyo’s next confirmed appearance here. And he wants me send his hide to the Shougun as a token of our appreciation for his leniency in allowing us to found a military village beneath his nose.”

“You told him where to shove that suggestion, I hope?” Madara asked.

“I wrote back unilaterally declaring independence from the shogunate,” Hashirama admitted. “His responding correspondence was… terse. He wants Kanshougyo sent to him alive as apology, as well as five million ryou in reparations.”

“That will bankrupt the village,” Tobirama objected.

“You can’t give him Tobirama to skin and mount on his wall!” Madara yelled.

“I know,” Hashirama replied. “Which is why I’m sending you to assassinate him. His successor is his eldest son, who is fourteen. Old enough not to require a regent, but young enough he should be cautious about picking battles with other large military powers.”

“Like Konoha,” Tobirama observed.

“Like Konoha,” Hashirama agreed.

Tobirama squinted at his brother. “This is why you’ve been odd recently, isn’t it? You’ve been worried about a war that none of the rest of us were aware was a possibility, because shinobi and the Shougun operate in such vastly different circles.”

Hashirama slumped in his chair. “Yes,” he admitted. “So, you’ll take the mission?”

“Of course, anija. He wants me skinned. I take personal offense. And I won’t leave any trail that leads back here.”

“Madara?”

“Someone has to watch your idiot brother’s back.”

Suddenly, Hashirama was beaming at them and leaping out of his chair to flutter around them, anxious and excited and _relieved_.

# The Births Of Seigen And Naoya, Rounin

Shinobi had a long tradition of disguising themselves as people of other ages, genders, professions, and occasionally species, all for the sake of getting closer to their target to carry out an assassination. Madara knew, for instance, that Tobirama’s younger brother, Kawarama, made the image of an excellent beggar without having to resort to genjutsu or henge – old clothing, a bit of dirt, and an exaggeration of his already extant limp were all that was required.

Madara and Tobirama could not waltz into the Shougun’s seat of power under a henge or a genjutsu and not expect to be discovered immediately.

The samurai clans might not have anything like the Byakugan or the Sharingan to allow them to see through illusions, but that did not mean they would not have sensors of one variety or another amongst their ranks.

So, here Madara was, attempting to sit still while Tobirama knelt behind him – one of the few people outside of Izuna he trusted to have at his back – with a brush, a comb, and a half-dozen other instruments of torture, and tried to wrangle Madara’s hair. They were a couple of days out from the border of the Land of Iron, where Minami Ryuichi usually resided in a castle nestled in an oddly-shaped valley between three mountains during the summer months.

In the winter, he tended to move south, to the coast.

Unless he was at war, but it had been decades since the Shougun went to war himself.

There was a painful tug on his hair.

“Ouch,” Madara hissed. “Be careful, Senju.”

“I am being careful. You just have too much hair,” Tobirama replied. “And it’s all tangled. Why is this one of your most recognisable features? I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either!”

Behind him, Tobirama made a noise that sounded a little bit like a snorting horse. Madara would know. They were working to adopt the guise of rounin, and a part of their disguise was the warhorses. Shinobi didn’t typically bother with horses, but samurai did, so here they sat, a hundred yards or so from the road, a pair of horses tethered nearby.

Although shinobi did not typically work with horses, this was not to say that Konoha did not keep a standing cavalry composed of shinobi partnered with ninuma.

Most of the larger clans had brought a small handful of paired horse-shinobi teams. They were extremely useful, the fleetest of messengers, although only the Hatake Clan, who had recent historical ties with the samurai, had brought horses explicitly trained to be used on the frontlines of battle.

Hashirama had granted them the ability to borrow two ninuma from Konoha’s shinobi cavalry unit, which was run by a terrifying grey-haired woman with eyes like flint and a personality like a smouldering fire just waiting to be stirred awake. She had looked at Madara, and Tobirama, with utmost disdain when they darkened the door of her stable, and had assigned them a pair of horses had been dropped from the program for one reason or another.

Madara thought it was some sort of belated revenge, though for what, he couldn’t possibly say.

Hakuhibari, _pale cloud_, Tobirama’s horse was a miserable and entirely too tame mare. Her former rider, one of Tobirama very distant cousins, Senju Arata, had died from a blood infection unrelated to the Konoha cavalry. Since then, no one had bonded with her, and she was listless and a battlefield liability, one that would surely get her next rider killed, because she simply didn’t care.

Madara’s horse, Matsukaze_, the wind in the pines_, had been ridden by Uchiha Soyokaze, who died just before the battle in which Izuna was grievously wounded. Since then, he’d had three more riders assigned to him by the stablemaster, but he was a temperamental animal, and he bit one’s fingers off, broke another’s ribs by crushing her against his stall door, and concussed the third so severely he had to retire from life as an active shinobi – he still had seizures on muggy days, and slept a lot.

Suffice to say, they were both having trouble with their respective mounts. Hakuhibari never wanted to move faster than a slow trot for Tobirama, and any additional urging had resulted in her stopping where she stood and just lying down in the middle of the road.

Madara spent most of his time in Matsukaze’s saddle watching the horse’s ears intently, waiting for the moment when the animal next started to buck. It was one thing to stick to a regular bucking horse with chakra. It was another to attempt to stay seated on a ninuma that was intelligent, trained to incapacitate, maim, and kill, and who would happily unseat his rider by throwing his entire weight into a roll over his shoulder with the intent of _smearing said rider across the ground beneath his enormous bulk_.

Behind him, Tobirama made a spitting noise.

Madara felt his hackles rise instantly. “Don’t spit in my hair!”

“It’s in my _mouth_!” Tobirama replied, and his voice was somewhat garbled.

“So? I get it in my mouth all the time. Stop being a baby.” There came the sound of a body hitting the earth, and Madara twisted around to look at Tobirama, who was lying on the earth behind him, making horrified choking sounds as he scraped his tongue with his fingernails. “I have no idea why people think I’m the dramatic one. It’s obviously you, _Kanshougyo-sama_.”

Tobirama narrowed his eyes at him, pulling a long black hair from his mouth and shaking his off his fingers. “It’s because you’re louder than I am. My dramatics are understated, most of the time, while you’re shouting at the top of your lungs, so they don’t notice me.”

“Ah, I see. Well, are you done?”

“No. I still think you should just cut it off.”

“No!” Madara shrieked.

Eventually, however, Tobirama had wrangled Madara’s hair into some approximation of submission. That is to say: most of the tangles were gone, and it had been pulled back into a high ponytail, although some of the hair that usually framed Madara’s face had escaped.

Tobirama scraped out a hollow in the earth, then summoned a little pool of still water for Madara to use as a mirror. He did so and found himself disconcerted. Wearing a different cut of amour without the Uchiha fan or colours, carrying a katana not his own, his hair sleek and dark and tame for once – it was like looking into the face of a strange. And he wasn’t even under a henge – this transformation had been performed entirely by altering the most superficial parts of his appearance.

“I think you look most elegant,” Tobirama purred in his ear, just as Madara was beginning to feel anxiety well in his chest. The Senju pressed his lips briefly against Madara’s temple, and joined him in looking down at the water, examining his own reflection. He hemmed and hawed over what to do for himself for so long Madara almost snapped at him to make up his mind – then opened one of the storage scrolls packed in his saddlebags and produced a roll of bandages which he used to cover his very distinctive crimson eyes and the marks on his cheeks.

“Won’t that put you at a disadvantage?” Madara asked.

“Not particularly,” Tobirama replied. “I’m a good sensor, and it’s not like I have a doujutsu I’d be impairing. Help me cut my hair, please. I want it to be much shorter. And then I’m going to need to do something about this mark on my chin…”

“What are those markings, anyway?” Madara had always wondered. When he was human, Tobirama had just the three – the one on his chin, and the sharp little slashes beneath each eye. When Tobirama was a dragon, there was another that ran up the length of his nose, splitting to either side of his forehead and tapering off just before the base of each antler. More marks spiralled down his neck, across his shoulders, down his sinuously, muscular back, and along the length of his tail, and barred his legs like red stripes.

“I never had them when I was a fish,” Tobirama replied. “I was just silver. But when I turned into a dragon, I was covered in them. I think they appear and disappear depending on how much latent nature chakra I’m channelling. Do you think a wound?”

“What, you’re going to cut your chin open to hide that mark?” Madara said.

Tobirama made a thoughtful noise. “No, that would be a bit obvious, just cutting my chin over the mark. I was thinking of going through my bottom lip, right the way down.”

Madara choked, revulsion and horror creeping over his skin like insects. “_No_! Don’t be an idiot! Why would you do that?”

“Disguise,” Tobirama replied. “It’ll heal in a week, which should be all the time we need for the mission. It won’t even scar.”

While Madara couldn’t disagree with his logic, the idea deliberately inflicting a painful, potentially disfiguring, debilitating facial injury upon oneself for the purpose of a short-term disguise nauseated him. On the other hand, Tobirama _did_ seem to heal unusually quickly, and his pale skin was a smooth, unblemished canvas for all that he’d been injured just as often as any other shinobi.

He shuddered. “Fine, but I don’t want to watch.”

“Very well. Help me with my hair, first.”

Some minutes later, Madara had trimmed Tobirama’s hair to a half an inch long, short and white and fluffy.

He turned away when Tobirama brought a kunai up to his own face.

They continued on their way, and Madara was forced to admit that, dressed in a neutral dove grey, his eyes bandaged, a stitched wound on his chin instead of the red chakra mark, his white hair shorn close to his skull, Tobirama also looked disconcerting unlike himself. The wound, especially, hid the mark on his chin in its entirety.

As they rode, they decided on names for themselves. Tobirama thought for a while, then chose Seigen, _the origin of purity_. Madara snorted at his lack of originality, then discovered he was struggling to come up with his own alias, and called himself Naoya, which meant _to be honest_.

“Well, it suits you,” Tobirama – Seigen – admitted, thoughtfully. “You have no tact whatsoever, and you’re never afraid to be honest when it suits you, although it could be said that your honesty is somewhat brutal.”

Madara – Naoya – bristled. “Shut up and see if you can’t get your mare to move a little faster. I’d like to get there before next winter.”


End file.
